for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.
I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness.
As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?
Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.
I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.
54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant".
(I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)
The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40% of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.
But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.
Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).
Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.
Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it.
--
On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.
When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.
Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.
Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.
- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.
- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.
- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.
I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.
Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:
1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media
I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.
The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.
This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.
The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.
It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.
These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.
That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.
Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/
(I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on twitter
All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much money is on the line, the standards are high.
it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.
I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them
There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn.
This feels kind of like that.
It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.
measurablefunc•2h ago