We need legal controls on web advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#61

Post by jasode » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #40

jasode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? [...] How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion? I'm (genuinely) surprised that someone with your financial background knowledge would write those sentences about "free market". I think you already know that the "free" in "free market" mean…

Well we gotta call it something, kinda like communism and democracy. It means a lot of things to different people, but those things still vaguely refer to similar ideas. I tend not to support stringent definitions on things ("The US is a republic, not a democracy") because basically it ends up being word games. If you look at economics, the idea is that people are rational agents. At least the orthodox idea which peo…

>So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something? [...] So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situations, why not in this one?

Since the majority of your reply is about justifying more positive government intervention, I've done a poor job explaining what I was talking about.

I already agree with government intervention to limit bad effects of advertising. That's not what my comment was about; instead, I was critiquing your rhetoric.

E.g. the following type of statement : "If people are not truly free thinking, how can we have a free market?!?"

The above statement has a nice poetic symmetry but doesn't actually advance the discussion in a productive way. Let me try more rhetorical examples and hopefully you'll see the same pattern:

Proposal: Facebook should open its social graph as API so users can be free to choose their own 3rd-party client and not be locked in a walled garden. But if users are not so free thinking, how can there be a free choice to choose their own social client?

Proposal: People should be able to freely choose which state or house they want to live in. But if citizens are not aware of hidden influences, and are not perfectly rational agents, and disadvantaged with information asymmetry, can there truly be a free choice to pick a home?

Proposal: People should be free to choose their spouse. But... [same pattern]... because people don't know hidden life influences that had predetermined their eventual mate selection, etc.

What I'm saying is that yes, we can be flexible with definition of "free" -- but that just means we're going down a rabbit hole of philosophical word games. I contend this isn't productive discussion.

If we want to recommend more positive government intervention, we can do that without the "free isn't truly free" philosophy.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#62

Post by marcinzm » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #59

marcinzm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.

But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.

>can do much better targeting than yourself.

All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#63

Post by marcinzm » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #55

marcinzm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.

>Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system. And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.

>it is not an egalitarian system.

Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#64

Post by ryanianian » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #60

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.

If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#65

Post by Zeing0Ch » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

I don't think that any government should ever make such fine-grained regulation. Telling the most innovative companies on the planet how they supposed to function is a recipe for disaster. There will never be another Google-like company if this becomes law that's for sure.

Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#66

Post by stevesearer » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical.

Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News?

There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meaningful way.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#67

Post by ddevault » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

ryanianian wrote: post #64

ddevault wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.

If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.

The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#68

Post by throwaway13337 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #66

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical. Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News? There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meanin…

The formalized ad business would be a good place to start.

At least you'd kill the ad supported business model because clarity of the transaction required.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#69

Post by Zeing0Ch » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #51

xkde wrote: post #25

Conversely, we could try not fiddling with it: https://youtu.be/6txA3pI0xJI And playing minesweeper.

Why? Because it will self-regulate? Because people will vote with their wallets? That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.

People do vote with their wallets, there are many websites that let you pay to remove ads. How is that not self-regulating?

> That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.

But lead wasn't known to be bad, once it was, an entire industry scrambled (successfully) to innovate to provide alternatives. I think this makes the opposite of your point lol

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#70

Post by superkuh » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:16 PM UTC

Legal controls? You mean you want to bring in government regulation so that all the players down to the smallest personal website will have to do all the things required of even the most giant corporations? So that once this onerous system of centralized control is set up it'll soon be bought and co-opted by the very people it was meant to regulate originally?

No. We've already seen this game play out over and over, and recently too! It's not like GDPR has stopped the big corporations from monetizing information about you. It's just made it so that WHOIS lookups are now worthless and don't even contain contact emails.