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What if we made advertising illegal?

simone.org

221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#221

To go halfway to the extreme of this article, I think banning large-scale billboards in my city would make a big difference. It feels like having a calmer public space is more in the public interest than reminding them to drink Miller Lite.

I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.

Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#223

I had this idea before, but thinking about it, you very soon run into some pretty uncomfortable tradeoffs. The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines. Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a…

Already solved elsewhere in the thread: Ban unsolicited advertising. Product recommendations in places where the consumer is explicitly visiting to get product recommendations are not unsolicited.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#224
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

I disagree, one component of advertising is discovering things you didn’t even know existed. Having to actively look stuff like that up would be much harder.

And why would you want to discover commercial products (NOT "things") that you didn't knew existed? That's some form of brainwashing that I don't accept and would gladly get rid of.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#225
Not surprising that people react as negatively to this in this forum as they do. Most people here would lose their jobs after all. Though keep in mind that once the dust has settled you'd also have the opportunity to do something more meaningful with your life than AB testing ways to make number go up faster.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#226
post #6

This seems to focus on online advertising. The question is how would you pay for many things on the internet?

There must be a reason someone hasn't invented a browser plugin for microtransactions on the internet? I'll gladly pay 25 cents to read an article from a news website, but I won't subscribe for a whole year for $25+, especially when there's dozens/hundreds of sites. Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem, but that could be mitigated by depositing say $15 at a time and deducting from the balance eac…

The problem with microtransactions is, who defines the minimum unit? Instead of just publishing a $0.25 article, a site could publish a $1.25 five-part series, each part duly ending in its own cliffhanger. And they'll do it as long as enough readers still keep reading it. (It doesn't matter how you'd prefer to read it, it only matters what they can get away with before profits start to decline. And it wouldn't have to be as drastic as this example, it would be a more subtle trend of less information expressed in more words over time.)

Also, with 10x or more value on each reader's copy of the article, say hello to more stringent copyright enforcement (either legally or socially: how dare you replicate the work of this beloved blogger and deprive them of income!). And the complete death of independent search engines.

I just don't see ubiquitous microtransactions leading to anywhere good on a social level. And of course, without a ban on advertising (however that's supposed to work), you'd just end up with sites full of ads on top of microtransactions.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#227
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that this is a very black and white view of the issue. I don't want to see billboards as I drive down the freeway, but I have no choice (in the US) if I need to get somewhere far away. Several states have banned outdoor billboards, should those governments be dissolved? At some point the public interest overrides an absolute freedom of speech. We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion…

It's just paraphrasing the declaration of independence. This is already the established world order. You have an extremist point of view that your right to free speech is granted to you by the government.

I'm not sure what comment you meant to reply to, but it certainly wasn't mine, as you have my ideology backwards there.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's open for discussion. Free speech is not limitless. You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts. Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.

"Congress shall MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." What part of that are you confused by? You are making a brash claim that the writ of the state includes the ability to censor speech. Your right…

That a significant proportion of advertising involves deceit, coercion, and captive audiences says a great deal about the nature of it. The First Amendment codifies the right to say what you want, to print or otherwise make public your thoughts. That doesn't give anyone, or anything, a right to force their ideas into the minds of the public or a subset thereof. And while advertisers are not quite yet forcing anyone to consume their product at the proverbial "barrel of a gun" they are far beyond the norms of human communication.

It is not acceptable for a stranger to come up and start shouting at you while you're trying to read, or hold a conversation, do your shopping, or put gas in your car. So why is it somehow acceptable for advertisers to do so? Would you want to pay for a course of instruction, some unknown percentage of which was not instruction, but was actually conducted at the direction of unknown others, who, with no regard or concern for your life, liberty, well-being or happiness were trying to extract wealth from you? Yet that is exactly what happens with much of our media-mediated experience of the world.

I think the underlying changes in the technology of communication have allowed advertising to grow without sufficient thought on whether such expansion was actually a public good. Like license plates - the impact of which changed radically when the government could, thanks to advances in technology, use them to monitor the position of virtually all vehicles over time, instead of being forced to physically look up who owned what vehicle - the explosion of media over the last century has been accompanied by an immense shift in the impact and capability and intrusiveness of advertising. And it's legality needs to be reassessed in that light.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#230
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising. The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising. Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising. We can later quibble about…

> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion b…

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels

This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.

> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!

Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.

Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.

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