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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#491

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#492

Post by Ray20 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #432
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…

Even if the authoritarianism to enforce it weren't by itself undesirable, banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market. It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.

>banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.

The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".

So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#493

Post by cookingrobot »

SoftTalker wrote: post #440
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…

As a fantasy it sounds nice but it immediately hits the wall of the 1st amendment.

How is that? There are lots of things that are illegal that are just “speech”.

Fraud, threats, impersonation, etc etc.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#494

Post by mbirth »

snailmailman wrote: post #402
stego-tech wrote: post #234

Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes . The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages. While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we canno…

Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”. It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over…

The trick with YouTube on iOS is to delete the app and use the website in Safari instead. There, you can use Wipr 2 or other ad blockers.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#496

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

Where do we draw the line at what counts as an advertisement? I just bought a cassette tape that I learned about from a Facebook post. What do we call that post if not an advertisement? And if that was illegal, how exactly would I have found out the tape? Word of mouth? I don't think there is anyone in a 100 mile radius who listens to the same kind of music as me.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#497

Post by stubish »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #388
jongjong wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The one where some sort of payment can be demonstrated in court. So quite possibly both if someone at the broadcaster accepted free back care services and decided to produce the story. But yeah, it could get very murky if you go down the rabbit hole and include things like owning shares in a health care provider.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#498

Post by unhingedcrouton »

Hell yes. Advertising is legitimate interest but it has become completely degenerate with social networks and the attention economy.

It is the root cause of many modern issues and _something_ definitely needs to be done about it. It even erodes capitalism itself by making consumers the product, which has been known for a while but the generalization seems non-obvious - that this happens every time when to the producer-consumer relationship is introduced a third party that changes the financials incentives of producers.

I probably wouldn't go as far as making advertising completely illegal but I'd like to see it regulated and probably limited to spaces specifically made to be "advertising hubs" both online and in the physical world.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#500

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

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…

I'd rather not live in a childless police state, actually.
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