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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#921

Post by cdecl »

camgunz wrote: post #658
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…

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…

The difference is that often, particular things are more concretely defined. A ban on advertising might be so onerous you wouldn't even be able to 'advertise' your FOSS projects on HN.

In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#922

Post by miki123211 »

Advertising is a tax on the rich.

It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube).

The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people spend more money than the poor (citation needed), they end up paying a lot more of this "tax" while getting the same amount of entertainment for it.

Targeted advertising only exacerbated these dynamics. Because high-spenders are very desirable customers to have, companies can now demand more money for the ability to target them, which turns advertising from a linear to a progressive tax.

Advertising turned the internet into a sort of public commons, with no government intervention and the inevitable inefficiencies and inflexibilities that come with those. It gave us free, high-quality video and voice calls to anywhere across the world, free unlimited texting, including picture messaging and group conversations, free video hosting for everybody, regardless of scale, free music (through Youtube, Spotify and the radio), with at least some compensation to artists, free movies and TV shows (on free-to-air TV as well as through services like Pluto), excellent free educational content (e.g. 3b1b, university lecturers hosted on Youtube at no charge), as well as cheaper entertainment overall through ad-supported tiers.

I think framing things this way is important when discussing advertising regulation. Maybe we want more cheap groceries, don't care about cheaper luxury cars and don't mind less free entertainment, so maybe we should ban grocery ads and encourage more Mercedes ads. Maybe we're fine with less free entertainment if it gets us fewer alcoholics, so we ban ads for alcohol. Those are tradeoffs worth thinking about, perhaps tradeoffs worth making, but they are tradeoffs, and it is important to be conscious of that.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#923

Post by habosa »

I would love if we could just make unavoidable advertising illegal. What I mean by unavoidable are things like billboards, bus stop ads, ads on the plane preceding the safety demonstration, ads in a train station, etc.

I’m very fine with ads on private spaces. In a guitar magazine, a few ads for new music equipment actually makes the product better and is a win for everyone.

I understand that this distinction has a gray area, but we could start with the black and white cases (Vermont has tried)

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#924

Post by elf-dwarf »

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…

Brave browser on mobile solves the problem for me

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#925

Post by vharuck »

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…

>People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.

I lost a lot of faith in the decency of others a month ago when I heard a song on my car radio, looked at the display to see the artist and title info that comes from the radio station, and was met with "Bounty the quicker picker upper." That slogan stayed up for at least a minute. Every possible channel of communication will be sold for ad space.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#926

Post by ta1243 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #532
grues-dinner wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed". And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of…

I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage. But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.

> But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable

So you get the main company with salaries from $1m-10m, they subcontract their operations to a company with salaries of $100k-1m which manage the cleaning contracts, and the people doing the work are just gig workers on less than $10 an hour.

But the main company doesn't have the CEO:worker imbalance

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#927

Post by amelius »

amelius wrote: post #430
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…

What I'd really like to see is a study on how much advertising drives consumerism and thereby eventually climate change / pollution. Maybe this could start some discussion.

Can anyone say why the sibling comment, pointing to this official document (see link), is heavily downvoted?

https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#928

Post by NeutralCrane »

cdecl wrote: post #921
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…

The difference is that often, particular things are more concretely defined. A ban on advertising might be so onerous you wouldn't even be able to 'advertise' your FOSS projects on HN. In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?

I don’t think it would be onerous nor ill defined. Simply make it illegal to pay someone to or receive payment for making a public announcement for a product, service, or brand. If no payment is involved, it’s fine. People are free to promote their own or others products on social media, YouTube, the side of their car or house, so long as they aren’t paid to do so. That is hardly any more convoluted or ill-defined than dozens of other laws on the books.

And yes, word of mouth and non-paid advertising is absolutely capable of spreading awareness on its own.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#929

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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."

I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription.

Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged.

But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing.

Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#930

Post by saul_goodman »

We describe "consuming" information and media just like food. I would settle for all media and advertisements having a required Nutrition Facts label:

Serving size: 1200 words / 60 seconds

Total commercial advertisement content: 600 words

Total US Government sponsored content: 300 words

Total foreign government sponsored content: 100 words

Total NGO sponsored content: 200 words

% of daily content of society shaping propaganda: 30%

% of daily content of subliminal content: 15%

% of daily content of emotional manipulation: %40

% of daily content of Gen5 warfare: 20%

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