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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#781

Post by ookdatnog »

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…

> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.

While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.

If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.

In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.

Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.

But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?

But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.

So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#782

Post by caseyy »

gameman144 wrote: post #289
Henchman21 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we be open to nuance when we’re being actively manipulated? Cease manipulating me and I will hear them out on the nuances, provided the advertisers can articulate it.

Someone telling you about a product is not manipulating you. Tracking or certain ad practices might be manipulative, and it's fine to push back against or ban that manipulation, but that is not at all inherent to advertising.

I'd say you're underestimating how much anxiety there is in the world because advertisers and influencers bombard people with the idea that they are not enough, or that they don't have enough.

It becomes very clear when you move to a different country where you don't speak the language. Suddenly, advertisers cannot tell you that you need their products. And it is very emancipating mentally.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#783

Post by nehal3m »

bofadeez wrote: post #121
gibbitz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else made the point that ads cost money, so this isn't about free speech. I guess making advertising free would be the same as banning it since it exists to be sold.

Any voluntary transaction between two conscious, consenting adults is axiomatically ethical and moral.

Following your axiom would imply advertisers would need to gain my consent in order to advertise to me. That would be a decent start.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#784

Post by cratermoon »

Making advertising illegal is probably not going to pass first amendment muster in the US (though god knows how much longer we'll have meaningful constitutional rights at all) but at one point there were laws against blatant misrepresentation, lying, and deception. Any such laws still on the books have long since ceased to be meaningfully enforced.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#785

Post by cratermoon »

grandempire wrote: post #749
camgunz wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this dynamic in tech all the time: "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything. "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread o…

One reason why the definition is more important when it comes to outlawing behavior is that when you get it wrong you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them. Ironically this is something lawyers and judges would pick up on immediately. You need an underlying principle of harm that can be applied consistently.

> you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.

There are many things individuals will consider "important and valuable to them" that are harmful to others. We prevent individuals from harming others for their own self-gain because that's what societies do.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#786

Post by qoez »

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…

A lot of winners today are those that get away with greyzone illegal practices. The same would happen in a "ads are illegal" world. People would pay for word of mouth, or even pay influential people to casually talk about it, but it'd be off the books etc.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#787

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #673
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…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making. We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy. But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recessio…

[deleted]

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#788

Post by sebastian_z »

It is an interesting thought. What could be new business models for sites that currently rely on third party advertising? It seems big publishers are increasingly moving to first party advertising. But that seems difficult for small publishers.

While advertising messages may not be themselves particularly important for free speech and can be even detrimental to it, e.g., propaganda, sites themselves disseminate speech and are often third-party ad-financed. What could be a good business model for them (other than direct payments)?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#790

Post by lolinder »

qoez wrote: post #786
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…

A lot of winners today are those that get away with greyzone illegal practices. The same would happen in a "ads are illegal" world. People would pay for word of mouth, or even pay influential people to casually talk about it, but it'd be off the books etc.

If you followed this line of reasoning consistently you'd advocate for no additional regulations to ever be imposed by government and all existing regulations to be walked back. That is, to most of us, patently absurd. The answer to your objection is to enforce the laws that we have, not to never make new ones.
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