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One of the dead comments in this thread calls for "criminalizing advertising". I am quite positive to this idea myself. Does advertising really do anything posi
by thomasahle 8y ago
One of the dead comments in this thread calls for "criminalizing advertising". I am quite positive to this idea myself. Does advertising really do anything positive to the economy and the world? Doesn't the paradox of advertising already prove that it is at best unnecessary?
Recently however I read about the time in the middle ages when guilts had forbidden advertisement. They took this to such a degree, that if a merchant would cough while a potential customer was walking nearby, the other merchants would accuse him/her of trying to catch the attention of the passer-by.
Perhaps the reason we allow advertisement is just that we don't know how to get rid of it.
However, then we should certainly try to regulate it as much as possible; make rules limiting it to the tolerable and perhaps undamaging.
Unfortunately, it may be that so many industries now depend on selling adverts, that limiting it in any meaningful degree would be very hard politically.
- rbinv 8y agoAds do help with discovery. But most of it is exploitation of psychological shortcomings and biases.
- chillacy 8y agoAnd as formal ads get phased out, we're starting to see native ads more and more on youtube. There are plenty that are disclosed but there are plenty which are not.
- thomasahle 8y agoThe unregulated ones are already illegal though.
- soared 8y agoYou work for a company that makes chatbots, virtual agents, a personalization engine, and analytics. How do you hold such an extreme opinion while contributing to it every single day? Advertising literally pays your salary.
- themacguffinman 8y agoBanning advertisement is fundamentally impossible in a free society because advertising is speech. You can't stop people from persuading other people. You can't realistically ban paid advertisement either, that just pushes it underground because it's so valuable that people will find a way to pay for it anyway. What you're asking for is a society free of financially-motivated influence, and I don't think that has/can/will ever exist. Even if you could get rid of advertising, that just cedes control of advertising to random natural factors like geography or chance. It's not clear to me how that's a better state of affairs.
- thomasahle 8y agoThe alternative wouldn't be chance. In the ideal world we would have unbiased reviews to guide us. I very much agree with you however. We can't ban it. It just practically isn't possible. We should be able to regulate it though.