What if we made advertising illegal? • Hacker News Board

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#461

Post by mdnahas » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:27 PM UTC

Economist here. My biggest issue is with the “news” industry.

Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.

I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.

I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).

I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#462

Post by vladms » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:28 PM UTC

From a forum with technical people (that build stuff) I would have hoped to see more ideas that would propose replacing advertising with something better (sorry, if I missed any replies, but did not see that).

Advertising can be useful (to find out about stuff) but very disingenuous (because people can lie). What I would very much like is to be able to assess the trustworthiness and similarity of people advertising me stuff. If someone likes same things as me and I never find him to "lie" (whatever my personal interpretation of that is) I should give him more trust. If someone picks things that I am not interested in and I think he favors stuff (because he is paid, for example) I should give him less trust. Then when I look for a product/video/restaurant I should see things recommended by people I trust more.

I know this kind of happens with "stars", "vloggers" and so on but lacking a system where you track it, means that it is easier to get complex to separate who is just "fun" and you watch but you know he lies and who is also "trustworthy" and you know you can also take his recommendations into account.

But that's just one idea, maybe there are others out there...

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#463

Post by luqtas » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:29 PM UTC

> I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change.

i would rather live in a world of public transportation, with less children and vegan oriented (climate change == enviroment) without people with guns and only at the hands of an effective police; 100x times than an ad. free world...

wrote this at my Android without a single ad. notification, via Firefox along ublock. been a while i watch an ad.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#464

Post by roenxi » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:32 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #386

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…

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…

That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#465

Post by chneu » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

luqtas wrote: post #463

> I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. i would rather live in a world of public transportation, with less children and vegan oriented (climate change == enviroment) without people with guns and only at the hands of an effective police; 100x times than an ad. free world... wrote this at my Android without a si…

That's an issue I have with this article. We can avoid advertisements, it really isn't that difficult. It can be inconvenient but that's better than slowly eroding your sense of normalcy.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#466

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

dzikimarian wrote: post #452

IMO advertising itself is ok, if not targeted by profiling user. I'm reading about bikes and I'm offered a bike or helmet? Fine by me. Problem starts, when I'm scrolling $socialWebsite and I see ton of biking ads, because some Orwellian ad network is tracking me through time & space. Then content starts to serve as means to push ads into my eyes whenever I dare to open them. If content is crap - doesn't matter - if I…

If ads are ok, how do you feel about this one https://i.imgur.com/599PMEl.jpeg

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#467

Post by thunky » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:37 PM UTC

sharemywin wrote: post #320

exe34 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to imagine. I hate advertising as much as the next guy - I intentionally try to associate negative thoughts with any adverts that interrupt a video I'm watching (I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past). But how do you separate advertising from product recommendations? Would it only apply if the person doing the recom…

does youtube exist without advertisers?

Yes it's called YouTube Premium and its not free but also not expensive. It's possible that the cost would go up without ad revenue from "free" YouTube.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#468

Post by 1oooqooq » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:42 PM UTC

nmstoker wrote: post #357

Nice idea but so utterly unenforceable. If you want to look at challenges around regulating advertising, the ASA in the UK is an interesting case, as when being set up in the 60s, they foresaw many of the difficulties and structured themselves to minimise them. If you're overly specific, people look for loopholes, so they focused on the spirit and they also went with a strong element of self-regulation whilst still h…

au contraire.

internet have very few entry points, and they are all corrupted by advertising.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#469

Post by cassianoleal » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

nico wrote: post #305

mixmastamyk wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism… You’ll likely be pleased to hear they use the word “propaganda” for advertising in Portuguese, at least in Brazil.

Same in Spanish. Propaganda and publicidad are interchangeable Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda

> Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda

In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).

In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.

The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.

I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.

Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.

Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#470

Post by charcircuit » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #413

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…

Anyone who has found out about a useful product through advertising that you wouldn’t have know about otherwise, purchased it, and been pleased with your purchase, raise your hand. Anyone? This whole “advertising is useful” thing sounds like the spherical cow of marketing to me. It might make sense in abstract but it doesn’t reflect reality.

There's several games I've enjoyed from seeing ads for them. I would have never seemed them out on my own.