For those who've said that advertising has led them to previously unknown / unrealised products or opportunities....
I've spent much time over the past few years trying to research some major purchases: household appliances, personal electronics, furniture, health-care items, data and communications services.
I'm actively looking for valid information. And despite the present insanely-advanced information ecosystem we have, it's an utter shitshow.
Advertising is all but worthless. There was a time when advertising actually contained voluntarily-supplied (as opposed to regulation-mandated) technical information on products. Even if that wasn't especially accurate or useful, it existed. For major consumer items that had largely ceased by the 1960s, for personal electronics perhaps the late 1990s / early aughts. Advertising largely relies on sex appeal and image rather than information.
Manufacturer / vendor / service-provider sites are swamped in similar emotional appeals rather than solid information, and it's tedious trying to dig through to any level of technical information. Even then, actual customer-oriented information tends to be relegated to third-party discussion sites, social media, Reddit (still occasionally useful, I very grudgingly admit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015402>), blogs, videos, and the occasional review site (most of which are also somewhere between highly suspect and useless). May the ghods help you if you want to root or re-ROM a device, and you're directed to highly-sketch English-as-a-fourteenth-language sites.
The highly-rated (NYT Wirecutter) cooker bought a year ago: multiple repairs and three replacements later, it still won't correctly pre-heat to a set point in some baking modes. Satisfactory in most other respects, but as a heavy baker, that somewhat curbs my enthusiasm.
A personal electronics device I'd written of with some happiness on HN has gone no-op, and it's taken me most of a year to even get to the vendor offering an RMA and repair shipping address.
Upgrading household comms (voice, data), and sorting through what options are actually available, all plans, costs, features, and details of service (obligations, total costs, privacy options, etc.) has been a nightmare.
Looking at mobile devices, sorting out how much privacy is possible (my conclusion: phones themselves are inherently surveilled by multiple factors, the only reasonable option is to offload as much activity as possible from them to elsewhere); what device, OS, and software capabilities exist; what various distinctions (chipsets, frequencies, OS variants) imply as to actual capabilities and performance; and elements such as system updates or rootability; require either onerous research or are impossible to find. (One vendor has an otherwise attractive offering that is three years old, I compiled a list of releases dating to 2011 trying to estimate release cadence and possible updates, best I figure there should be a new version in the next six months or so.)
Looking at mobile service, it wasn't until I started asking visitors to run speed tests on their own providers that I realised that 6x greater speeds were available through another network. (Why is there no multi-network test tool widely available, either in software or hardware? That would make a great tool-library lending item.) "Coverage maps" obscure more than they reveal, and site-specific performance is of course highly variable.
Never mind sussing out customer support levels and treatment. Though watching a friend go through a nightmare with ... one of our current vendors ... has strongly coloured my preferences going forward. This would be the same provider with 1/6 the wireless data performance of a competitor....
Information goods (software, services, texts) are inherently complex, and even the best reviews tend to be at best topical. I'm less interested in the unboxing experience than the multi-year retrospective ... after which the original product is almost always discontinued.
Deep information is ... frequently paywalled. You probably would find Consumer Reports worthwhile to subscribe to. Perhaps a few other report sites. Ideally this would be a public service, though with funding sufficiently independent that no one Federal, State, or Local government administration transition could imperil it.
Government regulators in the US, particularly at the national level, increasingly have a trust problem. By all appearances deliberately imposed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49044074>. State agencies lack resources to comprehensively test goods.
Increasingly, products are all but entirely unbranded. Marketing badges are slapped on, only to literally fall off shortly after purchase, if they are present at all. I find tableware, plumbing fixtures, and electronics all entirely bare of a manufacturer's mark. No-name Amazon and Temu brands are the norm. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49029594>.
It's not just that advertising is intrusive, manipulative, privacy-violating, and annoying, it's fucking useless.
But going out and hunting for information is only very slightly better.
It's a universal market for lemons, and that's not a good sign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>
Somewhat frequently discussed on HN itself (141 hits presently in submissions):
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Outright advertising bans ... might be somewhat premature. Or not. But I'd be quite interested in proposals for extremely punishing tax levels on at least certain classes of goods and services. And am open to bans within given categories: pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and gaming, and advertising directed at children, perhaps older adults as well. Also limitations on surveillance, tracking, and direct manipulation methods and practices.