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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#381

Post by TeMPOraL »

LunaSea wrote: post #271
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form.

I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models.

(Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#382

Post by SebastianKra »

gameman144 wrote: post #249

This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function. Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life tha…

> 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.

Journalists exist.

The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products. Companies can also promote a product by sending it to reviewers.

So ads are not the only way to inform consumers, and the benefits IMO don't outweigh the cost.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#383

Post by kodt »

permo-w wrote: post #161
amarant wrote: post #104

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…

>but we'd also lose (free) search engines. I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may al…

>it's not advertising if it's on their own website

Is SEO advertising though?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#384

Post by relaxing »

Terr_ wrote: post #284
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable. On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.

Thousands of years of adversarial training is what made us controllable — stick with the group, and we’ll defend ourselves against the enemy.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#385

Post by jongjong »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #358
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> imagine a world without advertising I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies. And in all cas…

Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.

There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws.

There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#386

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #358
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> imagine a world without advertising I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies. And in all cas…

What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).

Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#387

Post by cogman10 »

kragen wrote: post #352
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent differ…

> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away

It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).

The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".

> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"

Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.

There's not going to be ad speakeasies.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#388

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jongjong wrote: post #385
Ferret7446 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine a world without advertising I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies. And in all cas…

Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour. There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws. There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.

> Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.

So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier.

Which one is advertising and which one is not?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#389

Post by bradleyy »

The buried lede:

```Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers```

I want to believe that the author is hopelessly naive, and not a more nefarious actor. These traditional media gatekeepers are not by any means friendly to democracy; they're literal tools of the state, and actively work against the interests of the populace. I say this without a hint of irony: I trust social media more.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#390

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jajko wrote: post #301
LunaSea wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name. Most people never even thought about ads that way. For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting dis…

> I detest being manipulated

It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.

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