What if we made advertising illegal?

IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.

> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight

Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).

> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state

Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In more oppressive regimes, propaganda of certain ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in even more places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.

I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.

Although, since I brought up monopolies and other issues, perhaps state agencies may also usefully assist with restriction of advertisement, as they do with those. Social norms and laws are not mutually exclusive, after all.

The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users.

Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.

Knowing what you need is easy. Knowing what you might want is far harder.

But there is a certain kind of advertising that is detrimental. My first thought is Amazon 'sponsored' products. Allowing companies to pay money to put inferior products at the top of search results is bad for society. Same goes for Google sponsored search results. Sponsored content in general is terrible. People that have gained your trust selling you things and not actually telling you they are being paid to do so. There are many many digital ads that would not be allowed IRL because they would be stopped for false advertising by regulators.

Like most things in life these days, the problem is not the thing itself. The problem is the Wild West that is the internet where there is minimal regulation allowing people to lie, cheat and get away with it.

Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.

Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.

Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.

Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.