Most of the comments here talk about how terrible advertising is. Obviously, malware disguised as ads is a bad thing, and I understand the arguments for preserving our attention spans as well, but is there a space for good ads, which benefit both the user and the advertiser? I have bought many products which add value to my life that I probably wouldn't have found without advertisements. It seems like ads are still the best way to connect people to products. How do we preserve that, while stopping the bad actors from abusing the system?
To be honest, even if every ad were a "good ad", that is to say, if we could guarantee with 100% accuracy that every ad would be unobtrusive, malware free, targeted to things that are relevant to me, without invading my privacy or tracking me, then I'd still keep an ad-blocker installed. The simple fact is that I use an ad blocker because advertising is ubiquitous, and it works- that is to say, it has a measurable psychological affect on the people who are exposed to it. I would vastly prefer to minimize my exposure to things that are trying to convince me that I need things, or make me afraid that I don't have them.
I'd be okay with paying some sort of nominal fee to support a site that reliably has content that I like and is appropriately valued, but those opportunities are very rare. I've occasionally donated $5 or $10 to sites that I use that, when you are using an ad blocker, replace an ad with a message that says something to the extend to "hey, since we're not getting ad revenue from you, would you mind chipping in?". I've never subscribed or disabled my ad blocker for a site that tries to hold it's content hostage, and I can't imagine paying for sights that want $20+/month for a subscription.
Subscriptions are a terrible fit for the bulk of the web, and inhibit one of its signal advantages over other media (free-flow via hyperlinks between pages relevant to one's current purpose). I'd go as far as to say they are anti-web; entirely the wrong funding model.
Ads are from my perspective a disaster from too many angles to list here.
In short we don't have the right funding model available yet. Ads just prop up a poor one, making it possible to appear vaguely viable. So I think the more ad blockers spread, undermining the online ad industry, the better.
I'd be more convincing no doubt if I had the right alternative model at my fingers, but if I did I would probably be working on it not writing it up in HN. Micropayments of some sort seems to be the last man standing, but which and how and by who?
The "good" ads I've seen are mostly in conjunction with existing content.
A good example is subreddit-specific ads. For example, say that you have a woodworking subreddit. The ads would then sell wood, tools, maybe some instructional books, and so on. I don't have a problem with that. Another example is Amazon's "Buyers of this product also bought..." section. Oh hey, I need one of those as well.
What's frustrating are the general-audience advertisements that spam every medium. Coca-Cola, car ads, movie promotions, etc.
Of course, depending on the sector, even the niche ads can be just as shitty. I post a lot in /r/learnprogramming, and most of the ads on that subreddit are for get-rich-quick coding seminars that charge an enormous amount of money, promise the moon, and teach nothing that you can't learn from CS161 at your local community college.
I think the future is self-hosting: if nytimes.com got the search de-ranking and DNS blacklisting for hosting malware you can bet the advertisements would get way more scrutiny.
There are actually-good (-so-far) networks like Project Wonderful, but they're pretty small-time and don't pay very well compared to more crapware-saturated ad networks.
Good ads are called sponsorships. It's when the content creator and the advertiser creates a relationship because the advertising is relevant to the content or the audience. In this model the content creator also pledges some of his own reputation to product.
The algorithmic "stick in whatever ad in this box" network system sounds good on paper ("tailored to JUST YOU!"). But I've never seen it actually deliver on the promise. At the very best I get stalked around the web by ads for the thing I just bought last week.
I never really minded advertising on the web, personally, until a few years back. Two big negatives prompted me to install an ad blocker. The first negative was the increasing presence of malware reports in advertising. The second negative was the horrible tendency of advertising towards UI intrusiveness (full screen pop-overs, autoplay video, etc.) and causing the performance of the page to significantly slow down.
From my perspective, advertising is not terrible in itself. Advertising that punishes the user is terrible. Make the user experience of an advertisement good and useful, and get rid of the nasty malware stuff, and I suspect there will be a lot less motivation for ad blockers.
I have not, as far as I can remember, ever seen an ad for a useful product. What I have seen is nearly unending amounts of crap and things that I have already purchased.
When I finally got a car I got an ad for the local bus company - I know they exists, I have hated them for years. Now if there had been an add for a good way to find a parking space.
When I moved apartment I got ads for 3 months for a site that allows you to search available apartments (for a fee, of course) even long after I had moved.
Facebook also gave me an add for the exact degree I told them I had, at the university I already had it from. I only need one masters, thank you very much.
So I guess there is space for good interesting ads, at least in theory, but I don't think they exist in reality, at least not in great quantity; I also don't think they ever existed of line either.
I haven't seen an ad since my early 20's when I trained myself not to. Even in the most challenging environment (eg. cinemas) I have the capacity now to entirely avoid them. Despite that I've never had the slightest problem finding everything I need. No ad has ever done anything for me other than to annoy and fight for attention with things of genuine value.
I use an ad blocker now less to prevent ads appearing (which unless they pop over or flash or animate I would barely notice), than to keep data usage down (I'm in a rural area with extremely expensive data).
It might be unhelpful to the users who know how to take advantage of the current system, but hopefully the net impact will be greater price transparency, which helps consumers in the long run; people will pay more for things which cost the airline more, but not for arbitrary reasons like booking too early.
In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel market.
The problem is that there is no single price at which you can fill the plane enough and cover expenses. Set the price too low and your plane fills up but your costs are not covered. Set your price too high and you have so many empty seats that even with the handful of people paying outrageous prices you can't cover the cost of crew, fuel, and ground services. This means you have to sell some tickets at low prices, to attract the masses, and some tickets at high prices, to cover expenses. But now you have the problem of trying to prevent the people who can afford and are willing to buy expensive tickets from using the cheap fares. This is what leads to all the obscure rules about saturday night stays and layover impact and time of booking and whatnot. For a lot more info on this, see http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
Interestingly, low-fare airlines have tried working around the problem by setting prices super low, such that they lose money on each flight by default, but making it up in auxiliary services - either selling addons that cost them nothing on margin to implement (priority boarding, early checkin, seat selection), upselling external high-margin services (car rental, hotel bookings, airport transfer services, insurance, phone cards) or directly extracting money from customers (obtrusive advertising, in-flight sales pitches, extremely punitive charges for baggage/airport checkin/over-weight fees/not following obscure rules). This seems more sustainable than the traditional approach of customer price segmentation if price transparency increases over time.
> In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B.
That example is pretty simple. If you consider a non stop flight as a different product than one with layover, non stop has less competition, people who don't mind a layover are more price sensitive and if there's a layover the airline will compete with all the other airlines trying to fill their hubs.
I hadn't heard that before, but I like that way of thinking about it. It reminds me a bit of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Good grades might be a good measure of a student's performance, but when we focus on optimizing the grades themselves, they become less useful as a metric.
When I was in high school, there were some students who wouldn't take a class if it wasn't weighted, because it would bring down their overall GPA; even if it was an interest of theirs, they were worried that the effect on their class rank would hurt their college admissions chances.
I wonder how much of that "grade performance inflation" isn't due to changed externals but just due to the ever built-in ways of inter-generational parenting-evolution:
It doesn't matter that you are the only sibling graduating, what matters more is that once you've gone PHD you'll (openly/subconciously) put your expectations on display for your kids to see.
As a college-grad, how likely would you tolerate ("welcome"), your kids leaving education with a high school diploma?
As a phd, I'd be perfectly fine with my kid(s) finishing with a HS diploma. Why? Well 1st, it would be a lot cheaper for us! 2nd, I wouldn't at all be worried as long as the internal drive is there to further their own education.
A lot of people have the idea that once formal education stops the need to learn ceases. In fact, the need to learn should never cease because progress can always be found. What changes is that once formal education stops, learning becomes self-driven. So whether a person has a HS diploma or a phd is irrelevant if their internal drive to progress has stopped.
If you want to spend the time to dig into it, Caltrans has a more detailed dataset of historical traffic [1]. I used to research traffic in the Bay Area, and it was fascinating to see the way in which it responded to different events.
