You could say the same about blocking ads. It makes some people miserable.
The premise of the article:
> Ads and other forms of marketing ostensibly serve a straightforward economic role. Firms selling goods and services need to tell consumers about the availability and desirability of their wares, and spend on advertising to do so. By informing consumers about the relative merits of various products, ads improve the quality of purchasing decisions and, conceivably, leave both firms and shoppers better off than they would be in an ad-free world.
(Had to laugh hard at the last sentence.)
Good products don't have to use advertising. Their existence alone, plus worth of mouth (e.g. reviews) assures customers become aware of good deals. Take good Black Friday deals, for example. There's a lot of BS and fake deals around, but if you search well enough there are some true gems hidden within.
Also, to me, advertising always meant some kind of deal. Merely mentioning the existence of a product doesn't cut it. It has to be a real deal where I'm saving money on the conventional price. Of course, marketeers hacked their way around that by making the discount price higher and the normal/non-discount price higher (above the actual real normal price). Old trick which is also heavily in use during Black Friday.
The conundrum is the more these tricks are used on consumers they will figure them out (eventually) and quit falling for them. So false advertising kills off the advertising market. My argument is that exposure to [such] false advertising killed the advertising market for me, and being the reason why I use adblockers 24/7.
> Some firms target impressionable children
Which is AFAIK illegal in NL, as it should be. However targeting the parents of children is legal, and... annoying.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
