Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )
It became such a problem that people working inside Ad industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity inside the HN community.
I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads.
Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are absolutely effective though.
Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.
This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.
When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.
At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.
