Advertising Is a Cancer on Society • Hacker News Board

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#331

Post by anoncake » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #221

joshgel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen. But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.

Wow. Banning something unhealthy. That didn’t work out so well for alcohol or drugs. The last thing I want is more government power.

A government does not gain power by exercising it.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#332

Post by buboard » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

rabidrat wrote: post #177

FroshKiller wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single day, new people are born who actually do not know what Coca-Cola is and thus have never bought a Coca-Cola.

The same is true of cocaine. Yet without advertising the people who 'need' cocaine manage to learn about it and acquire it, often at great personal cost.

Dealers advertise their stuff. Otherwise you have a chicken and egg problem

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#333

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

davidivadavid wrote: post #304

TeMPOraL wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace GM with a factory, and advertising with dumping toxic waste into the local river. Would you still cry about the lost jobs if someone proposed banning dumping toxic waste into rivers?

So replace something with something that's completely different. Would your opinion be different? I guess so.

The two scenarios aren't that different. Sure, poisoning rivers is worse. But my point is that "think of the jobs it supports" is a poor argument for a practice that hurts people at large.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#334

Post by magduf » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

_virtu wrote: post #116

magashna wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went and visited my parents who still have cable. I sat and watched for a little while and was dumbstruck by the ads every few minutes. It was unbearable. I don't know how anyone can deal with it unless you don't know better

It pains me so much. Every time I visit the in-laws I find myself thinking this. Their living room is centered around a tv, that is on no matter the time even if no one is watching. During get togethers, you'll hear adverts blasting. It just feels offensive knowing that this has become their norm. To be fair to the in-laws, my parents do the same as well. It's mind numbing.

I'll give my elderly mom credit: whenever I visit her, she has the TV on, but it's always playing something on Netflix. I never see ads at her house any more.

Strangely, my ex-gf, who had zero interest in watching any kinds of movies or TV with me (she said it was all stupid) and just wanted to text her friends while I was visiting liked to watch the local news every morning, ads and all.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#335

Post by asark » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

amiune wrote: post #86

wpietri wrote: post #23

He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…

If every company stopped advertising then google and facebook and twitter will disappear. Are all these companies pure waste? How do you fund a replacement for them? Should these services be provided by governments?

It wouldn't be that big a deal. Ad-funded commercial services like Facebook and Twitter would probably just be protocols, if not for all those ad dollars incentivizing moat-creation and jealous user capture. We'd figure something out to replace google—the need's too strong not to. The replacement(s) probably wouldn't make $3,000,000/employee or whatever Google does, though. Which is fine.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#336

Post by skummetmaelk » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

dooglius wrote: post #289

FussyZeus wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to? Coke as a company is responsible for some horrifying effects on the world. Health effects, economic depression in the developing world, ongoing environmental harm. And for what? Sugar water. Not space travel, not energy, not transportation, not safer aircraft or cars, not saving lives, no. For fucking. Sugar. Water. And they're far from the only company burning energy, effort, time and knowledge…

The parent comment said that externalities should be priced in, I am saying it's not an externality and is already "priced in" if it hurts only the drinker. That's orthogonal to Coke being good or bad.

The externalites aren't priced in though. Heavy consumers of soft drinks require more health care on average which affects insurance prices of non-drinkers. To be truly "fair" this should be factored into the price of such products so that buying a coke includes an x dollar tax for your estimated increase in medical needs. This is however only doable with a socialized medical system.

The other option is to let insurance companies monitor your diet, but that sounds quite a bit more dystopic...

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#337

Post by anoncake » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

crimsonalucard wrote: post #106

wpietri wrote: post #23

He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste. For example, everybody on the planet is now familia…

Ah only a strong central government could redirect resources and restrict freedom of speech in such a manner. In theory this works, in practice it doesn't. Nobody is quite sure about what the dichotomy is between the theory and actual results. Basically by allowing commercial interests to control the direction of capital you get useless areas of inn-efficiency like advertising. The weird thing is, these types of econ…

That's why a strong central government is important. To make sure resources are allocated to useful purposes rather than garbage like advertising.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#338

Post by Fnoord » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #316

Fnoord wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.

We may assume there are fansites for escape rooms available. Such serve as word of mouth advertising, just like reviews do. There is more focus on facts, and the user voluntarily participates (in contrast to all the billboards, online advertising, useless pages in magazines)

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#339

Post by asark » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

starpilot wrote: post #2

We get rid of it, Google/Facebook/etc. shut down. While social media is of arguable benefits, Google has provided incalculable value to the world. Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

> Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

They're not too great at the "all" part. Or the "organize" part, anymore.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

#340

Post by summerlight » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

_petronius wrote: post #26

starpilot wrote: post #2

We get rid of it, Google/Facebook/etc. shut down. While social media is of arguable benefits, Google has provided incalculable value to the world. Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

> Google has provided incalculable value to the world I'm not convinced by this statement, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning behind it. Is it specific products? Specific technologies? Although Google has built some interesting stuff, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that they've done that was either a) something that couldn't have been invented without them, or b) only unique due…

a) something that couldn't have been invented without them

Are you suggesting that order of magnitude improvements on information accessibility in a planetary scale is nothing?

b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation

Scaling out search engine to the entire globe is THE innovation. You need to realize that any kind of innovation doesn't freely come from a bunch of idea guys, but from execution.