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Vietnam bans unskippable ads

saigoneer.com

531–540 of 835 posts

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#531
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along and suggests the industry should do the right thing. In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!

Regulation is only a policeman. It doesn’t innovate. Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the former has skippable ads. I’m guessing you haven’t taken even one semester of the relevant economics. Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

You think one semester of economics entitles you to belittle people like that? What in a libertarian mind is doing that?

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#532
post #13

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't…

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#533
The main app I use with unskippable ads (usually for crappy games, ugh) is FlightRadar24 - since it remembers where you were on the map, I will always just swipe up and kill the app, and it's usually not to hard to find what I was looking at again after re-opening. Of course that wouldn't work with something with more state but I'm glad I can do that.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#534
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple. There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example. The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist…

Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#535
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?

If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?

Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.

I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#536
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.

You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.

People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#537
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By making it illegal? Brands can still compete on price and quality.

Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This isn’t a good outcome. I also question if the shelves would even changes much. They will probably prioritize their high margin products, which doesn’t sound any better.

Where does the money to pay for shelf space come from if not the money we pay for food?

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence. Better middle steps: ban on public advertising ( e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.

I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick? You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.

> would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

How would you define ad space?

> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service

An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)

If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#539

I am shaken to my core (sorry, wife hates that phrase, so I have to use it everywhere) at how many posters here see ads. I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them. To that end: Andriod: - Root your damn phon…

> Root your damn phone! I did for many years, and finally gave up. With recent Androids, life in the rooted world is much more difficult: Netflix automatically drops to a lower quality tier. Many apps now just refuse to work on a rooted phone. But the worst thing: If I want to update the ROM to get the latest security benefits, I have to wipe my data. Surprised you didn't mention something like PiHole.

PiHole is fine, I guess. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because:

  - It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
  - It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
  - It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can. 
  - The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.  
It's far easier to just install uBlock and tell my wife, if something breaks, just click the red shield icon, then click the giant power button.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#540
post #131

Translated source: https://thuvienphapluat-vn.translate.goog/phap-luat/ho-tro-p... Online advertisements only. I was curious how they were going to implement that on TV! It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or "negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here

> Wonder if that's the real purpose here

I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following how well they actually enforce them though.

More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive faction who created this law and the old school side, and they probably had to add that text to get it into law.

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