&gt; Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them?<p>Some ads are pushing adware, malware or worse, for sure. And some AdSense ads are designed to look like search results, to trick people looking for Chrome or whatever. But even honest ads are designed to trick us into buying stuff that we hadn&#x27;t planned on. Or to trick us into impulse buying, without proper research, reading product reviews, asking friends, and so on.