Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if we made advertising illegal?

simone.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 1001 posts

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#481

Post by gavmor »

threatofrain wrote: post #458
ipaddr wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probation only moves the activities underground. Not focusing on ad tech specifically but removing all advertising would mean finding other ways to get your message out which is advertising. The only way to stop it is to stop communication in form and function. Limiting certain types of advertising or changing tax codes to not allow dedicating expensive could shape it in a way that meshes with society. Trying to rein…

> Probation only moves the activities underground. That implies that people want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Which actually already impinges on advertising because advertising doesn't want to be secret, advertising wants to be as visible or popular as possible. Advertising is inherently easier to regulate because of this.

[content creators] want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Examples: AudioGO, PodcastOne, Acast.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#483

Post by simonsarris »

lukev wrote: post #40
hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

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.

> If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

This is unbelievably untrue. Consider clothing brands, large and older labels have an immense advantage over newcomers. Newcomer word of mouth will never come close to some brand that has a store in every mall across the US.

With (say) Instagram ads alone, tiny labels can spend and target very effectively to create a niche, and begin word of mouth.

Gap and Lululemon would love it if all advertising was shut off today. It would basically guarantee their position forever because of the real estate and present day distribution Schelling point.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#484

Post by dietr1ch »

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…

> 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.

I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.

So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#485

Post by hinkley »

remram wrote: post #253
hinkley wrote: post #5

Don’t need to make it illegal just make it not deductible.

It's deductible?

In the US advertising is considered a business expense. So we equate it with investing in infrastructure or research, both of which reasonably would be subtracted from your revenue to determine your tax burden.

It's very dumb.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#486

Post by mystified5016 »

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…

There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards.

One of these is good and one is bad.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#487

Post by llbeansandrice »

roenxi wrote: post #464
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they happy? They resist any legislation to label things as ads and want them as unobtrusive as possible. They take over the platforms while there’s still astroturfing and sponsored content charading as regular content.

If we ban billboards at least the the countryside will look nice

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#488

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

mdnahas wrote: post #461

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 th…

>I think the news industry should be advertising free.

When's the last time you paid for a newspaper?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#489

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

noworriesnate wrote: post #256
ndr wrote: post #239

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…

There’s a strong tendency to have a bias towards the status quo because we’re afraid of things being worse. And that bias can make us afraid of even trying to change things for the better. All of the problems you listed can be prevented from becoming endemic by having clear definitions in the law and generally reasonable judges. But if our judges are generally unreasonable, we are screwed either way. So what’s the do…

There's no such thing as a clear law, hence the need for judges. Too many people in this thread have never taken a contract law course if they think you can just "write good laws".

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#490

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.
Post reply on HN