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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.
This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…
So lets do this: ban all ads in print, video, and in-public. Make the fine so high that you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy and close up shop. Or just straight up revoke corporate charters. There’s your line. I’m happy to start here and negotiate backwards. But this needs to be in effect while we work it out. Advertising is killing us. I don’t need or want myself or my family constantly assaulted by ads.
Finally, to be frank I find advertisements a sibling of propaganda. I don’t want either.
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.
So, if no one competed to get ahead of competitors, by making better or cheaper products and to grab the available marketshare, we would just have better and cheaper products without it? Sounds flawed to me.
https://genius.com/Minutemen-shit-from-an-old-notebook-lyric...
Almost every single time speech is limited someone finds a way to weaponize that limitation. In most jurisdictions there are, at times weaponized, limitations, and that's the tradeoff those jurisdiction landed on. I don't see how this proposed limitation could produce acceptable weaponizations. Just think for a second how outlandish these would sound with such limitation in place: - The ban on "persuasive content" is…
Thus as always in society finding the right approach and right way of regulating isn't easy.
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.
Even if you're right, think about the positive effect that'd have on society. The people with cool, interesting products would be the ones who put a little intentionality and effort into it, incentivizing everyone to be a little more thoughtful.
Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
People market themselves when they put on makeup. Should makeup be banned too?