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What if we made advertising illegal?
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#842I 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…
Advertising is a nuance of action in the informational world the way combat is a nuance of action in the physical world.
We can draw the line between an aggressive blow and a firm handshake. We can distinguish that.
We will figure out how to distinguish manipulatory mindfucking from regular conversation too.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#843Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising. The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising. Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising. We can later quibble about…
Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech.
Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#844I 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…
For the same reason weights and measures legislation is of course impossible.
This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#845Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with almost all your points, but this is just false: > Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. We don’t need marketing, we need information. Objective information, that would be easier to come by in the absence of manipulative marketing.
You are defining marketing as manipulative. In fact, marketing is just "bringing a product to market". For example, it includes having booths at a trade show. The line between objective information and "puff" is impossible to draw. I googled "strollers" and got: Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model. Is this mani…
We can see historically that advertising evolved from the charmingly blunt "Foo Bros. makers of hats" to "makers of the FINEST hats" (untrue, but at least we still know what business they're in...) to "wear Foo or no one will talk to you again". Along the way, regulations had to be enacted here and there, snake oil didn't actually raise the dead, so lying about that was banned, but letting us feel that we're inadequate because we can see how happy and cool the people wearing Foo are on TV (or TT) is just their free speech. And of course there are the side effects TFA touches on like building trillion dollar empires for Goog and Meta, and using the same levers to manipulate voting and buying.
Personally, I can imagine a world without ads because I block them everywhere I can, and somehow I still manage to buy things, even if they might not be making me feel as cool as I should if I'd only play along.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#846Earlier 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…
Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided. 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…
> 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).
This is true, but only for the set of messages that produce value that can be captured by the advertiser. This set is a small subset of messages that produce value. For example, a message about the benefits of excercise/socializing/climate action would produce a lot of value, but not in a form that any single advertiser can capture. So a lot of high value messages don't get produced in the current system, and might have a better chance in a more "natural" attention economy.
Advertising also increases the value of a product, so the value of things whose value can be captured by advertisers will be inflated when compared to their value in an environment without advertising.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#847This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…
This argument is an example of the Perfect Solution fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
It really isn’t. The comment argues that the proposed solution is unworkable and would have adverse consequences, not that it would only partially work.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#848I 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 to live in a world without murder, and murder is difficult to precisely define and identify, and yet neither of those are good reasons to oppose making murder illegal.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#849Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.
There's a fairly clear line between opinion and advertisement. For instance, one is paid for and the other is given freely.
What does it mean to be paid? Money? Goods? Services? Favors?
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#850USA would rather ban abortion than advertising