41–50 of 90 posts
We could just start making it illegal to advertise to children. Without age verification, it's just a burden of proof with the advertiser that their ad isn't targeting children and a ban on age specific target groups for ad platforms.
What's the advantage to stopping there?
I LOVE this idea and advocate for it in private convos all the time. Banning ads and enabling (micro-)payments for accessing content that is currently ad-supported would be an unimaginable game-changer.
Definitely not. I don't want to pay for every single website I visit for example, it creates a chilling effect overall as to my want of visiting many different sites.
wouldn’t it actually feel good to patronize websites you were interested in with actual direct value instead of everyone relying on spyware and obnoxious spam covering content directed at you?
i am in favor of this. of course, in America, that would mean no 1st Amendment which I am okay with doing away with as it has served its purpose. I would say the exception would be one must speak with 100% certainty. No 'virtually no side effects' and none of this 'best burger in 200 miles'.
Just change it to right to express your opinions, which is what was probably meant by the founding fathers. For sure they didn't mean right to bribe and right of companies to "speak", anyhow, so it needs to changed in any case.
So technically, it's possible but of course politician's corruption is a big issue..
It'll get replaced with something even more annoying that isn't called advertising but is functionally identical. People make things then talk about them. It's normal. A careful read of this piece should show you why advertising was invented in the first place and why it's fundamental to commerce. Unless you want to go back to buying from your neighbor or buying only what your limited circle of friends can recommend…
It's coupled to the financial incentives of the entities operating the platforms used to create and distribute this content (Google, Meta, ...). And as we depend on them in so many aspects of our life unfortunately, they'll initially start acting as usual when being "regulated":
"We're so sorry dear $REGION_OF_THE_WORLD, your legislators declared our products as ads. Due to how we've built these products (Pixel Phone, Gmail, WhatsApp, ...), we can't sell them to you in a legal way anymore. Yes, we made a ton of money from you, but it's your government's fault that you now loose access to what feels like essential communication services."
We all know it's been different in the early 2000s, but today these distribution/communication channels only exist because there's money to be made. We can't take them for granted and just expect different content on YouTube, non-addictive TikTok and less privacy-invasive Gmail or search engines.
I'm glad the author acknowledges this:
> Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Changing behavior and expectations will be necessary; and I'm all here for it. I'm hosting my own emails since 2013. *DAV works just fine and I never uploaded contacts or calendar events to iCloud. I pay for search results. And even though I like the iPhone or would prefer a MacBook, I could reactive my 10yrs old "gaming PC" as a Linux workstation to fulfill my computing needs.
I understand this is not for everyone, but I hope that after the band-aid got ripped off, the digital life will improve to become easily accessible again while staying privacy friendly and pro society.
i am in favor of this. of course, in America, that would mean no 1st Amendment which I am okay with doing away with as it has served its purpose. I would say the exception would be one must speak with 100% certainty. No 'virtually no side effects' and none of this 'best burger in 200 miles'.
> ...no 1st Amendment which I am okay with doing away with as it has served its purpose. Has it? I would love to here the reasoning behind this.
Like, the movie industry as a whole cannot exist without advertisement. Nobody would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on production of the scale of Odyssey, if there's no way to communicate to enough people about the movie's existence so they could come to a theater on a given date and pay to watch it.
How can someone take risks and spend time and capital inventing or building a new product if there's no reliable way to let potentially interested people know about it other than word of mouth? What about antisocial people who don't have friends and prefer to not talk to strangers? How are they supposed to ever find out about new shit that could change their lives?
Am I allowed to walk around saying "I really like product X" out loud? If not, then it feels like a freedom of speech problem. If yes, how can you be sure I'm not financially or some other way incentivized to do so by the company producing product X?
The fact that the author doesn't even attempt to engage with any of these questions makes articles like these really infuriating to read.