11 ms·

The case for banning ads in social media

135 points by chanind 7y ago

andrewljohnson 7y ago
Gun companies can't advertise on Instagram, so they pay shills to do posts. In a world where social media ads are overall illegal, you'll see wild contortions to skirt the law.
- Porthos9K 7y ago
  So what? We should ban all advertising, and then nuke corporations who flout the ban or try to find a loophole. And don't tell me advertising is free speech. As far as I'm concerned, corporations are not people and have no rights. Like governments, a corporation's powers are defined by law.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - buboard 7y ago
    what about sole proprietors? or professionals? can the government advertise? it is not people either and how do i know you 're not paid for that comment?
    - buckminster 7y ago
      Corporations have a huge government-granted advantage - unlimited liability - yet they still claim the privileges of personhood. Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you don't you don't.
      - buboard 7y ago
        i m totally behind the abolishment of the government-corporation cartel complex, but then there would also be nothing to ban. And people would still ask for ads to be banned , which IS a human rights violation.
      - krapp 7y ago
        >Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you don't you don't. I don't recall where in the US Constitution free speech is defined as only being granted in proportion to legal liability. I only recall the part where "Congress shall make no law (...) abridging freedom of speech." I know some on HN hate advertising in all its forms but there's no way around this - you can't make advertising illegal without also essentially making free speech illegal. You can regulate advertising, of course, as you can regulate speech with libel and slander laws, FDA labeling requirements, etc. But you can't ban it outright. And you certainly can't have inalienable, natural rights be contingent upon legal fictions.
    - Porthos9K 7y ago
      Bubby, I ain't getting paid nearly enough to hang out here. It's just a bad habit.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >And don't tell me advertising is free speech. Advertising is free speech. >As far as I'm concerned, corporations are not people and have no rights. Well, that's just, like, your opinion. >Like governments, a corporation's powers are defined by law. The law defines corporations as entities with rights, including the right to free speech, and therefore they have an abstract form of personhood for various legal reasons. If corporations had no rights, they would have no right to enter into contracts as a singular entity, nor would they have the right to use, or to be sued as entities.
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    What’s an ad? And, what about corporations that are people? That is, a small business run by one person, like an Etsy shop?
- r00fus 7y ago
  This argument (loopholes will kill enforcement) are brought up time & again. The goal isn't to eradicate ads, it's to make them cost more so there's overall less of it (or that it's embedded in ways that don't seem like ads). I'd argue that product placement is less bad than outright attention theft. Because I ignore it or I notice and think less of the content (or in some cases it's like Waynes World where it's a mockery of the product placement which bolsters the content).
noads 7y ago
I support this movement.
spodek 7y ago
Pictures of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards leads me to support this idea. Some examples (with a couple bonus pictures of London removing billboards): https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret....
- buboard 7y ago
  Yeah sure if you remove ugly structures from anything it looks better. (BTW empty billboards look ugly). You can settle for "good looking advertising", which a lot of cities do anyway. I dont think the calls for ban are solely for aesthetic reasons
  - kick 7y ago
    All advertising is bad-looking. It's intentionally created to draw your attention without your consent, and distracts from anything actually of interest.
    - buboard 7y ago
      some advertising is ugly. most of it is intentionally designed to create a positive emotional response, in many cases including art. Think different.
      - normalnorm 7y ago
        All of it is designed hijack your attention against your own interests. What you call "positive emotional response" is only positive from the point of view of the advertiser. From the point of view of the victims, it as intrusion on their thoughts of attention, and almost always an attempt to implant a desire into their mind. Ads are art to the same degree that cannibalism is gastronomy.
        buboard 7y ago
        most apple users here would disagree plus i m not sure if you re aware how extreme your position is Most of our beautiful classical art was advertisements for the Church most graffiti is uglier than ads
throwaway8291 7y ago
It's funny to imagine the year 2024. There are millions of small fake worlds consisting of streams of events, videos, and conversations - a beautiful algorithmic balancer will keep each of these quasi-communities humming, guiding their participants through their day with lots of - engagement. There's a weirdo movement of people, who are not following one of the 50000 synthetic celebrities, that live and breath and adored by many. Content generation will be semi-automatic, at least. And ads and non-ads will just merge more. The most targeted ad is one, that I do not even recognize. I feel detached (not bad) today - I will feel alien (maybe bad) in ten years.
- buboard 7y ago
  celebrity arises from the perceived superiority of those people to everyone else. In an increasingly connected world, there are fewer celebritis, not more, as the human brain has a limited capacity for meaningful social connections.
JohnFen 7y ago
Personally, I think it's more important to ban the tracking that ad companies engage in.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Absolutely. Tracking and data collection is the issue, ads qua ads are fine, I don't think this was ever really a significant conversation in offline advertising in newspapers and magazines in years gone by. It's the tracking (online and offline) that's unpalatable.
meritt 7y ago
> One could imagine going back to the old Whatsapp model of charging users $1 per year Facebook has around 2.45B monthly active users. On a global basis, they would need to charge every user $28/yr to make the same annual revenue. I'm not sure what studies to cite, but I think it's relatively safe to say they'd lose a significant portion of their userbase if they started charging, and thus would need to charge a whole lot more than $28/yr per user. While I can appreciate the notion, there's a zero percent chance any large social media platform like Facebook will ever ban ads.
- nindwen 7y ago
  > there's a zero percent chance any social media platform such as Facebook would ever ban ads. Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.
  - buboard 7y ago
    so basically force facebook to shutdown so that all these people flock to HN which is ads-free? The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.
    - matheusmoreira 7y ago
      They could try charging users for access to a clean, spyware-free social network instead. If Facebook can't survive without selling their users like products, then good riddance. It wasn't meant to be.
      - buboard 7y ago
        "try to charge" , and "survive only on ads" are not mutually exclusive. FB could charge for ads-free, but nobody would use it. It's delusional assume otherwise, with FB costing the average person $40/year, which is in some places on earth the entire year's income. I also assume FB doesn't offer the option because it's too much work to filter all the tracking in and out of their properties.
some_random 7y ago
I don't agree with the idea that banning ads would lead social media networks to become less addicting, which seems to be taken for granted. If twitter charged $1 a month (which has to be far more than they make from ads served to me), they are still incentivized to keep me on the site. Sure, they might not make marginal dollars from my eyeballs, if I quit then they make nothing. Even if it's a one time purchase, they still want me there to draw my friends there.
- asdff 7y ago
  At that point, you are paying for a tool. And you want your tool to be good. The site design maximizes time on site by minimizing the rate of information you can get. "Catching up" takes forever, compared to when most social media websites were chronological. If I'm paying, I want something that maximizes my productivity. Imagine if adobe released an update that made something that took 2 steps into 7 steps, just to make sure you are spending a larger % of your day screwing around in Photoshop. There would be riots in the streets.
- throwaway122378 7y ago
  Our data is worth more to them than the equivalent ad dollar
walrus01 7y ago
Here's a personal opinion that might be wildly unpopular with entities whose revenue stream is primarily composed of advertising. I work in network engineering for an ISP, which is a mid-sized regional ASN. there is no reason why the internet needs to have advertising on it at all, for people to both make use of it and pay for it as end-user residential consumers, or businesses. as an ISP that has both wholly-owned facilities-based last-mile services, and that uses third-party last-mile services, these are entirely paid for by the subscriber revenue. Our revenue is also sufficient to pay for inter-city transport services, IP Transit upstreams, various colocation costs, and all of the infrastructure needed to connect to various IX points and content delivery networks. Essentially, look at it as the same difference between Netflix, Amazon Prime, or traditional advertising-supported cable television. Residential end-user internet service is now just as essential as having functioning water, sewer, or electrical grid connection. The monthly subscriber fee per connection when aggregated between dozens of thousands of individual endpoints, is more than sufficient to support a robust, redundant ISP that can pay competitive salaries to its staff.
- buboard 7y ago
  ISPs also pay wages which support the economy. There is a 500B industry which subsidizes the web. If you remove it, the cost will be deducted from the wages of everyone who works in tech. Also, this will lead to even more centralization as ads are the only channel for still-small businesses to reach critical mass.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    I have very little objection to seeing targeted, specific ads in certain places. For example if I'm browsing the Anandtech website, and there's ads for technology/hardware enthusiast stuff, that's both relevant and helps pay the bills for Anandtech, enabling them to pay their staff. I don't see why advertising needs to pervade every aspect of social media. Imagining Facebook's advertising revenue cut by 85% really doesn't make me sad at all. Facebook has to lay off some people, who will then go out into the economy and get jobs possibly doing something more productive with their time than selling advertising. There is not a 1:1 venn diagram overlap between "the internet" (the actual backbone and middle mile infrastructure that runs underneath) and "the web" (http/https based content websites and social media things like instagram).
drcross 7y ago
It's nearly 2020, why can't I pay to get rid of Ads on Instagram, Facebook and Google? There must be a price where it makes sense to do this. It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly placed ads.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  another comment estimated that every user would have to pay about $28 a year for a no advertisements policy to be revenue neutral for facebook. but not every user is equally worth advertising to; I would assume that users who were actually willing to pay the subscription would be some of the most desirable advertising targets. maybe the price where it would actually be worth it to offer ad-free facebook to people who would be willing to pay is too high to admit publicly.
- OJFord 7y ago
  > It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly placed ads. I like to imagine that behind every billionaire there's a 'Technical Secretary', or whatever the title might be, installing PiHole and doing whatever else to solve these stupid problems that for whatever reason their employer doesn't realise is a stupid problem that every user of the employer's app has.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  The people that advertisers are trying to reach are the people who would pay for an ad free experience. Billionaires are not using Facebook or instagram except in a curated fashion.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
A ban on ads would be great but would not to be a universal solution. We need anti-ad technology that works regardless of the legality of ads. Open source blockers should come pre-installed with browsers, operating systems, router firmwares.
buboard 7y ago
Let's fundraise to run a facebook campaign to ban all the ads then!
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> While almost everyone can agree that something must be done I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a very strong correlation between people who think something must be done, and people who think they must be granted more power to control the flow of information across the internet. As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading information has existed. The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought. Trying to ban it is impossible, and establishing an authority to enforce the truth won’t decrease the amount of false or misleading information communicated, it will only ensure that all false or misleading information aligns with the views of the authority.
- bloody-crow 7y ago
  > As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading information has existed I don't think it's ever been at such level, though. The whole modern economy incentivizes the amplification of false and polarizing information for the sake of maximizing engagement. > The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought It can only get you so far. You can see that even respectable sources are slowly slipping into reporting unverified info and hot controversial takes for the sake of clicks and ad revenue these days. If left alone, this trend will produce a situation where there won't be any source you trust enough to cross-check against.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    > I don't think it's even been at such level I haven't seen any evidence of that. Human beings communicate and consume information much more than they have before, but where's the evidence that has made the 'problem' worse? We're much less insular than we've ever been before, so any increase in exposure to misleading information has been accompanied by an increase in exposure to opposing view points. > It can only get you so far So can any pursuit of the truth. If you want to set the bar at discovering universal truths, then you're going to be disappointed. > this trend will produce a situation where there won't be any source you trust enough to cross-check against Good. There should never be a single source that you trust to always tell you the truth.
euske 7y ago
I'd advocate a somewhat opposite direction. Require all the ad companies to show which ad is paid by who, and how much. This will probably kill some ads, but I guess some business still want to pay for the exposure of their products. Personally I don't think banning something or hiding something would work, because people will always find alternative venues. Preemptively pushing the transparency is the only way forward.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That's a more workable solution. Still, the bulk of the people will not care.
hirundo 7y ago
Advertising is speech. The more exceptions we carve into free speech, the easier it is for governments to censor. It is authoritarian to dictate what one person can say to another. That authority may be justified in limited categories like threats or fraud. When those categories become too broad, the authority gains a hugely powerful tool to manipulate and cement itself in place. I don't think I have the right to get between two people and silence one of them, just because I think he's trying to sell something.
- TotempaaltJ 7y ago
  Corporations don't, or shouldn't, have a right to free speech.
  - idoh 7y ago
    The "right to free speech" is more a prohibition (via the first amendment) on Congress passing laws that abridges speech, and not a granting of rights to this or that entity.
  - buboard 7y ago
    even if your proposal has merit, the most contentious type of advertising seems to be political advertising . I don't read often complaints about flower store advertisements. yet politicians are not corporations
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Says who, you? That's nice. >Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances There's no mention of "people" or "citizen" in that text. The government *cannot prohibit speech". Of course, there are a few exceptions to that rule, but making more should have an incredibly high bar for approval, and you want to use it for advertising? Enact laws that protect people from malicious and over zealous tracking, which I'm sure we would both agree is a gross violation of privacy.
- 7y ago
makomk 7y ago
Why just ads in social media? It seems like you could replace social media with the mainstream media in this argument and it would make just as much sense.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Because they are an established part of the political machine and status quo.
jacquesm 7y ago
What will happen is that the ads will go underground. You'll simply no longer know whether the person talking to you is an 'ad' or really saying something they stand behind. To some extent this is already happening, but banning ads will push that to the limit. Ads at least can be controlled by the platform to a degree with user generated content that is much harder because there is so much more of it.
mr_toad 7y ago
Are adds in America totally unregulated or something? Why hold Facebook to different standards from anyone else? And why are the people who complain about social media the most, also the people who use it the most? Sounds like they’re pretty happy with it when they can use it to push their agenda.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Ads in the US are very lightly regulated.
bloody-crow 7y ago
I don't find those takes convincing mainly due to the fact that authors never attempt to do a proper though experiment to test their own hypothesis. Let's imagine for a second, that US and EU governments get together and for real ban all ads on social networks. The end-user product of Facebook & Twitter majority of users interact with on a daily basis represent maybe ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on. The rest is some crusty under-the-hood tech geared towards collecting user information, selling/targeting ads, and rearranging your feed in a way that maximizes time you spend on the site. If there's no ads, all this tech is suddenly useless. Facebook would immediately have to fire 80% of its staff. Its market value would plummet. They'd have to implement subscription model, that majority of users would immediately reject. Even if they accept a huge loss and allow people to use the site for only $5/y, I imagine only 10-15% of currently active users will accept it. Now when maximising ads is not a priority, people start spending way less time yelling at each other on social media. They need to spend this time some other way. I'm too lazy to think further, but it's clear that "just ban the ads" is a HUUUGE change that will affect so many things at once, that it's almost impossible to predict all effects it's gonna produce.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on Citation needed. 20% of tech by what metric? I'd say the majority of work at FB, by far, is plumbing, like at most tech companies.
- asdff 7y ago
  What if nothing changes? Does facebook get the bulk of their money from selling ad space on facebook, or from collecting data points from users to better inform ad space on other websites?
jdoliner 7y ago
Banning things tends to lead to the market routing around the ban, via black / grey markets. In the case of ads is hard for there to be a true black market, because ultimately the ad needs to reach a users pupils. But I suspect if you outright banned ads you'd get a lot of grey area, such as promoted posts, affiliate messages, influencers. Things that blur the line between ads and content. Instead I'd prefer a high excise tax on advertising transactions, similar to how we tax cigarettes. That way it doesn't ban advertising outright, but it does change the cost analysis on it, and it becomes a source of revenue for the state that (in theory) everyone can benefit from.
houseboat 7y ago
I hate the idea of ads: When you get around to the concept of using ad-supported media for "free", you know where you left off. For instance, if you were willing to give up on ads, you'd make an explicit change to ban people from social media. It may not hurt them in the long run, but it's certainly useful for people and probably also for advertisers. This way, advertisers get more value out of advertising, and they don't have a need for ads on other platforms. The big problem is not that you don't own all the content that you don't own, but that many of your content is being used. That is not the same as blocking adverts.
danfang 7y ago
I wrote a similar article earlier this month, about the (hopefully) ad-free, tracking-free future of social media: https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-social-networks-look-like-a5fda90cffb7 https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-social-networks... It really lines up well with your points about engagement, advertiser incentives, and political disinformation! Here's to hoping people choose to use/build new social tools that better align with our interests and values.
cm2012 7y ago
It would become much harder for challenger companies to unseat incumbents.
firefoxd 7y ago
Social media banning ads is like a printed newspaper banning ads. The dollar and some you pay for a copy is for the production of the paper and delivery only. What pays for the journalists, the research and all are the ads. Why would they remove the ads? [1] Unfortunately the newspaper industry didn't have much of a say since advertisers found a more lucrative venue online. Now they are shutting down. But social media companies have a say. You can't tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks. Social media is not a public utility. I think they should have all their ads. My suggestion is to follow the less dramatic path of teaching people how to use the internet. I am serious. Most people don't even know they are on the internet when they are on their phone. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism
- beerandt 7y ago
  Except the content on social is already free.
- Koremat6666 7y ago
  >u can't tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks. there are plenty of products more than number of newspapers out there, if you are not happy with these platforms you can start your own far to easily too. Just the way newspapers are dying so will facebook, twitter, instagram and many others. We only need for the next big thing to rise. On that day people will lament how awesome was Facebook that helped independent writers, journalists and influencers and how the new thing is ruining the world.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    Except all of these things have the same critical flaw; they all depend on advertisements to pay the bills. To get advertisers, they need engaged audiences. To get engaged audiences, they need various social mechanics to drive engagement to an artificially high rate than their service would otherwise have. They also are then incentivized to police content in ways that make the medium more appealing to advertisers. Then eventually people get sick of it, and a new upstart shows up offering a better experience with less advertising. And people move on, until the same factors cause the same cancers to grow in the new one, which eventually cause it's own demise. Ironically, by banning advertisement, you would eliminate one of the biggest drivers of change in social networks that cause them to die. Not all of them, of course, but one of the biggest by far. In a strange twist, you might well save the social network from succumbing to the cancer it's leadership always inflicts upon it. The qualities that make a social network useful for the purpose of allowing social networking are almost completely at odds with the qualities that make it attractive to advertisers, almost to a comical degree: * Privacy controls and default-enabled secure settings hide information from advertisers * Securing people's social circles from advertisers reduces their ability to target * Protecting people's photos from being co-opted for use in apps or scanned for auto-tagging reduces reach * Policing outrageous, clickbait, or controversial content reduces the main clients social networks have for paid promotion Basically, the ideal social network would either charge a base subscription fee and provide an ad-free experience, or would be free, and be entirely subsidized by the Government. I cannot envision a private company willing to provide a user-centered experience that would be a net good for the userbase, because everything the users want and need conflicts with what the network would want to sell to advertisers.
205guy 7y ago
I think the solution is to ban the "algorithm" that determines your feed. People sign up for posts and photos from friends and family and groups, instead that is held hostage and released as a trickle with ads and fake endorsements (your friends like brandX) and targeted stories chosen to trigger emotions and go viral. The feed should go back to being RSS essentially, that's what people really expect out of fb/instagram. Also, just like government sets limits on roadside advertising, online advertising should be limited (area-wise or frequency), with clear distinction and attribution for all ads. In addition, there should be limits to profiling such that ads can't be shown to less than 10K viewers for example.
thelock85 7y ago
It’s kinda interesting that the response to social media ads is “ban them all” when the same targeting system could be used to inform and educate people on how to improve their station (and perhaps in the end, have more money to buy stuff).
erichocean 7y ago
Why limit the ban to social media? I'm for a 100% ban on advertising in all forms across all media with no exceptions.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  You're going to pay for all this formerly free stuff right?
not2b 7y ago
You can't get rid of ads. But ads should be transparent and it should be visible to all that X paid for an ad, sent it to Y group and said Z. That would prevent politicians from, for example, advertising to people on one side of an issue that he is on their side, and to people on the other side of an issue that he is on their side, knowing that neither group will see the other ad. Then they could keep people from doing new last-minute ads right before an election so they can't sneak in whoppers before the honest press can catch them.
Animats 7y ago
Maybe just stop making advertising a tax-deductible business expense. Advertising in the US is negative-sum - the population is mostly spent out, so it doesn't create demand, it just moves it around a bit. But it adds to the price of products. In many cases, more than the price of producing the product. Tax policy should not encourage that.
- deafcalculus 7y ago
  Not saying this is a bad idea, but how will reduction in ads create more demand? If anything, demand will go down because people working in ads will lose jobs or get paid less.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
laurex 7y ago
There's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. But if the business model is trade users and their data for advertising revenue, there's no chance that the users' best interest can be served. That said, as someone working on social technology where we've expressly decided to not go down that path, it's also clear that the dark patterns that an ad-driven approach lead to are also effective at driving growth. I'm curious how many people will pay rather than have their data collected and sold. My guess is that it takes more than just being ethical to charge for social tech, it takes adding extra value as a product as well. I'm betting my current career on the idea that there is an alternative.

135 points by chanind 7y ago

Gun companies can't advertise on Instagram, so they pay shills to do posts. In a world where social media ads are overall illegal, you'll see wild contortions to skirt the law.

Porthos9K 7y ago
So what? We should ban all advertising, and then nuke corporations who flout the ban or try to find a loophole. And don't tell me advertising is free speech. As far as I'm concerned, corporations are not people and have no rights. Like governments, a corporation's powers are defined by law.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- buboard 7y ago
  what about sole proprietors? or professionals? can the government advertise? it is not people either and how do i know you 're not paid for that comment?
  - buckminster 7y ago
    Corporations have a huge government-granted advantage - unlimited liability - yet they still claim the privileges of personhood. Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you don't you don't.
    - buboard 7y ago
      i m totally behind the abolishment of the government-corporation cartel complex, but then there would also be nothing to ban. And people would still ask for ads to be banned , which IS a human rights violation.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you don't you don't. I don't recall where in the US Constitution free speech is defined as only being granted in proportion to legal liability. I only recall the part where "Congress shall make no law (...) abridging freedom of speech." I know some on HN hate advertising in all its forms but there's no way around this - you can't make advertising illegal without also essentially making free speech illegal. You can regulate advertising, of course, as you can regulate speech with libel and slander laws, FDA labeling requirements, etc. But you can't ban it outright. And you certainly can't have inalienable, natural rights be contingent upon legal fictions.
  - Porthos9K 7y ago
    Bubby, I ain't getting paid nearly enough to hang out here. It's just a bad habit.
- krapp 7y ago
  >And don't tell me advertising is free speech. Advertising is free speech. >As far as I'm concerned, corporations are not people and have no rights. Well, that's just, like, your opinion. >Like governments, a corporation's powers are defined by law. The law defines corporations as entities with rights, including the right to free speech, and therefore they have an abstract form of personhood for various legal reasons. If corporations had no rights, they would have no right to enter into contracts as a singular entity, nor would they have the right to use, or to be sued as entities.
- t-writescode 7y ago
  What’s an ad? And, what about corporations that are people? That is, a small business run by one person, like an Etsy shop?
r00fus 7y ago
This argument (loopholes will kill enforcement) are brought up time & again. The goal isn't to eradicate ads, it's to make them cost more so there's overall less of it (or that it's embedded in ways that don't seem like ads). I'd argue that product placement is less bad than outright attention theft. Because I ignore it or I notice and think less of the content (or in some cases it's like Waynes World where it's a mockery of the product placement which bolsters the content).

noads 7y ago

I support this movement.

spodek 7y ago

Pictures of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards leads me to support this idea. Some examples (with a couple bonus pictures of London removing billboards): https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret....

buboard 7y ago
Yeah sure if you remove ugly structures from anything it looks better. (BTW empty billboards look ugly). You can settle for "good looking advertising", which a lot of cities do anyway. I dont think the calls for ban are solely for aesthetic reasons
- kick 7y ago
  All advertising is bad-looking. It's intentionally created to draw your attention without your consent, and distracts from anything actually of interest.
  - buboard 7y ago
    some advertising is ugly. most of it is intentionally designed to create a positive emotional response, in many cases including art. Think different.
    - normalnorm 7y ago
      All of it is designed hijack your attention against your own interests. What you call "positive emotional response" is only positive from the point of view of the advertiser. From the point of view of the victims, it as intrusion on their thoughts of attention, and almost always an attempt to implant a desire into their mind. Ads are art to the same degree that cannibalism is gastronomy.
      - buboard 7y ago
        most apple users here would disagree plus i m not sure if you re aware how extreme your position is Most of our beautiful classical art was advertisements for the Church most graffiti is uglier than ads

throwaway8291 7y ago

It's funny to imagine the year 2024. There are millions of small fake worlds consisting of streams of events, videos, and conversations - a beautiful algorithmic balancer will keep each of these quasi-communities humming, guiding their participants through their day with lots of - engagement. There's a weirdo movement of people, who are not following one of the 50000 synthetic celebrities, that live and breath and adored by many. Content generation will be semi-automatic, at least. And ads and non-ads will just merge more. The most targeted ad is one, that I do not even recognize. I feel detached (not bad) today - I will feel alien (maybe bad) in ten years.

buboard 7y ago
celebrity arises from the perceived superiority of those people to everyone else. In an increasingly connected world, there are fewer celebritis, not more, as the human brain has a limited capacity for meaningful social connections.

JohnFen 7y ago

Personally, I think it's more important to ban the tracking that ad companies engage in.

OJFord 7y ago
Absolutely. Tracking and data collection is the issue, ads qua ads are fine, I don't think this was ever really a significant conversation in offline advertising in newspapers and magazines in years gone by. It's the tracking (online and offline) that's unpalatable.

meritt 7y ago

> One could imagine going back to the old Whatsapp model of charging users $1 per year Facebook has around 2.45B monthly active users. On a global basis, they would need to charge every user $28/yr to make the same annual revenue. I'm not sure what studies to cite, but I think it's relatively safe to say they'd lose a significant portion of their userbase if they started charging, and thus would need to charge a whole lot more than $28/yr per user. While I can appreciate the notion, there's a zero percent chance any large social media platform like Facebook will ever ban ads.

nindwen 7y ago
> there's a zero percent chance any social media platform such as Facebook would ever ban ads. Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.
- buboard 7y ago
  so basically force facebook to shutdown so that all these people flock to HN which is ads-free? The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    They could try charging users for access to a clean, spyware-free social network instead. If Facebook can't survive without selling their users like products, then good riddance. It wasn't meant to be.
    - buboard 7y ago
      "try to charge" , and "survive only on ads" are not mutually exclusive. FB could charge for ads-free, but nobody would use it. It's delusional assume otherwise, with FB costing the average person $40/year, which is in some places on earth the entire year's income. I also assume FB doesn't offer the option because it's too much work to filter all the tracking in and out of their properties.

some_random 7y ago

I don't agree with the idea that banning ads would lead social media networks to become less addicting, which seems to be taken for granted. If twitter charged $1 a month (which has to be far more than they make from ads served to me), they are still incentivized to keep me on the site. Sure, they might not make marginal dollars from my eyeballs, if I quit then they make nothing. Even if it's a one time purchase, they still want me there to draw my friends there.

asdff 7y ago
At that point, you are paying for a tool. And you want your tool to be good. The site design maximizes time on site by minimizing the rate of information you can get. "Catching up" takes forever, compared to when most social media websites were chronological. If I'm paying, I want something that maximizes my productivity. Imagine if adobe released an update that made something that took 2 steps into 7 steps, just to make sure you are spending a larger % of your day screwing around in Photoshop. There would be riots in the streets.
throwaway122378 7y ago
Our data is worth more to them than the equivalent ad dollar

walrus01 7y ago

Here's a personal opinion that might be wildly unpopular with entities whose revenue stream is primarily composed of advertising. I work in network engineering for an ISP, which is a mid-sized regional ASN. there is no reason why the internet needs to have advertising on it at all, for people to both make use of it and pay for it as end-user residential consumers, or businesses. as an ISP that has both wholly-owned facilities-based last-mile services, and that uses third-party last-mile services, these are entirely paid for by the subscriber revenue. Our revenue is also sufficient to pay for inter-city transport services, IP Transit upstreams, various colocation costs, and all of the infrastructure needed to connect to various IX points and content delivery networks. Essentially, look at it as the same difference between Netflix, Amazon Prime, or traditional advertising-supported cable television. Residential end-user internet service is now just as essential as having functioning water, sewer, or electrical grid connection. The monthly subscriber fee per connection when aggregated between dozens of thousands of individual endpoints, is more than sufficient to support a robust, redundant ISP that can pay competitive salaries to its staff.

buboard 7y ago
ISPs also pay wages which support the economy. There is a 500B industry which subsidizes the web. If you remove it, the cost will be deducted from the wages of everyone who works in tech. Also, this will lead to even more centralization as ads are the only channel for still-small businesses to reach critical mass.
- walrus01 7y ago
  I have very little objection to seeing targeted, specific ads in certain places. For example if I'm browsing the Anandtech website, and there's ads for technology/hardware enthusiast stuff, that's both relevant and helps pay the bills for Anandtech, enabling them to pay their staff. I don't see why advertising needs to pervade every aspect of social media. Imagining Facebook's advertising revenue cut by 85% really doesn't make me sad at all. Facebook has to lay off some people, who will then go out into the economy and get jobs possibly doing something more productive with their time than selling advertising. There is not a 1:1 venn diagram overlap between "the internet" (the actual backbone and middle mile infrastructure that runs underneath) and "the web" (http/https based content websites and social media things like instagram).

drcross 7y ago

It's nearly 2020, why can't I pay to get rid of Ads on Instagram, Facebook and Google? There must be a price where it makes sense to do this. It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly placed ads.

leetcrew 7y ago
another comment estimated that every user would have to pay about $28 a year for a no advertisements policy to be revenue neutral for facebook. but not every user is equally worth advertising to; I would assume that users who were actually willing to pay the subscription would be some of the most desirable advertising targets. maybe the price where it would actually be worth it to offer ad-free facebook to people who would be willing to pay is too high to admit publicly.
OJFord 7y ago
> It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly placed ads. I like to imagine that behind every billionaire there's a 'Technical Secretary', or whatever the title might be, installing PiHole and doing whatever else to solve these stupid problems that for whatever reason their employer doesn't realise is a stupid problem that every user of the employer's app has.
Ensorceled 7y ago
The people that advertisers are trying to reach are the people who would pay for an ad free experience. Billionaires are not using Facebook or instagram except in a curated fashion.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

A ban on ads would be great but would not to be a universal solution. We need anti-ad technology that works regardless of the legality of ads. Open source blockers should come pre-installed with browsers, operating systems, router firmwares.

buboard 7y ago

Let's fundraise to run a facebook campaign to ban all the ads then!

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> While almost everyone can agree that something must be done I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a very strong correlation between people who think something must be done, and people who think they must be granted more power to control the flow of information across the internet. As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading information has existed. The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought. Trying to ban it is impossible, and establishing an authority to enforce the truth won’t decrease the amount of false or misleading information communicated, it will only ensure that all false or misleading information aligns with the views of the authority.

bloody-crow 7y ago
> As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading information has existed I don't think it's ever been at such level, though. The whole modern economy incentivizes the amplification of false and polarizing information for the sake of maximizing engagement. > The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought It can only get you so far. You can see that even respectable sources are slowly slipping into reporting unverified info and hot controversial takes for the sake of clicks and ad revenue these days. If left alone, this trend will produce a situation where there won't be any source you trust enough to cross-check against.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > I don't think it's even been at such level I haven't seen any evidence of that. Human beings communicate and consume information much more than they have before, but where's the evidence that has made the 'problem' worse? We're much less insular than we've ever been before, so any increase in exposure to misleading information has been accompanied by an increase in exposure to opposing view points. > It can only get you so far So can any pursuit of the truth. If you want to set the bar at discovering universal truths, then you're going to be disappointed. > this trend will produce a situation where there won't be any source you trust enough to cross-check against Good. There should never be a single source that you trust to always tell you the truth.

euske 7y ago

I'd advocate a somewhat opposite direction. Require all the ad companies to show which ad is paid by who, and how much. This will probably kill some ads, but I guess some business still want to pay for the exposure of their products. Personally I don't think banning something or hiding something would work, because people will always find alternative venues. Preemptively pushing the transparency is the only way forward.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 7y ago
That's a more workable solution. Still, the bulk of the people will not care.

hirundo 7y ago

Advertising is speech. The more exceptions we carve into free speech, the easier it is for governments to censor. It is authoritarian to dictate what one person can say to another. That authority may be justified in limited categories like threats or fraud. When those categories become too broad, the authority gains a hugely powerful tool to manipulate and cement itself in place. I don't think I have the right to get between two people and silence one of them, just because I think he's trying to sell something.

TotempaaltJ 7y ago
Corporations don't, or shouldn't, have a right to free speech.
- idoh 7y ago
  The "right to free speech" is more a prohibition (via the first amendment) on Congress passing laws that abridges speech, and not a granting of rights to this or that entity.
- buboard 7y ago
  even if your proposal has merit, the most contentious type of advertising seems to be political advertising . I don't read often complaints about flower store advertisements. yet politicians are not corporations
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Says who, you? That's nice. >Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances There's no mention of "people" or "citizen" in that text. The government *cannot prohibit speech". Of course, there are a few exceptions to that rule, but making more should have an incredibly high bar for approval, and you want to use it for advertising? Enact laws that protect people from malicious and over zealous tracking, which I'm sure we would both agree is a gross violation of privacy.
7y ago

makomk 7y ago

Why just ads in social media? It seems like you could replace social media with the mainstream media in this argument and it would make just as much sense.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Because they are an established part of the political machine and status quo.

jacquesm 7y ago

What will happen is that the ads will go underground. You'll simply no longer know whether the person talking to you is an 'ad' or really saying something they stand behind. To some extent this is already happening, but banning ads will push that to the limit. Ads at least can be controlled by the platform to a degree with user generated content that is much harder because there is so much more of it.

mr_toad 7y ago

Are adds in America totally unregulated or something? Why hold Facebook to different standards from anyone else? And why are the people who complain about social media the most, also the people who use it the most? Sounds like they’re pretty happy with it when they can use it to push their agenda.

JohnFen 7y ago
Ads in the US are very lightly regulated.

bloody-crow 7y ago

I don't find those takes convincing mainly due to the fact that authors never attempt to do a proper though experiment to test their own hypothesis. Let's imagine for a second, that US and EU governments get together and for real ban all ads on social networks. The end-user product of Facebook & Twitter majority of users interact with on a daily basis represent maybe ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on. The rest is some crusty under-the-hood tech geared towards collecting user information, selling/targeting ads, and rearranging your feed in a way that maximizes time you spend on the site. If there's no ads, all this tech is suddenly useless. Facebook would immediately have to fire 80% of its staff. Its market value would plummet. They'd have to implement subscription model, that majority of users would immediately reject. Even if they accept a huge loss and allow people to use the site for only $5/y, I imagine only 10-15% of currently active users will accept it. Now when maximising ads is not a priority, people start spending way less time yelling at each other on social media. They need to spend this time some other way. I'm too lazy to think further, but it's clear that "just ban the ads" is a HUUUGE change that will affect so many things at once, that it's almost impossible to predict all effects it's gonna produce.

cameronbrown 7y ago
> ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on Citation needed. 20% of tech by what metric? I'd say the majority of work at FB, by far, is plumbing, like at most tech companies.
asdff 7y ago
What if nothing changes? Does facebook get the bulk of their money from selling ad space on facebook, or from collecting data points from users to better inform ad space on other websites?

jdoliner 7y ago

Banning things tends to lead to the market routing around the ban, via black / grey markets. In the case of ads is hard for there to be a true black market, because ultimately the ad needs to reach a users pupils. But I suspect if you outright banned ads you'd get a lot of grey area, such as promoted posts, affiliate messages, influencers. Things that blur the line between ads and content. Instead I'd prefer a high excise tax on advertising transactions, similar to how we tax cigarettes. That way it doesn't ban advertising outright, but it does change the cost analysis on it, and it becomes a source of revenue for the state that (in theory) everyone can benefit from.

houseboat 7y ago

I hate the idea of ads: When you get around to the concept of using ad-supported media for "free", you know where you left off. For instance, if you were willing to give up on ads, you'd make an explicit change to ban people from social media. It may not hurt them in the long run, but it's certainly useful for people and probably also for advertisers. This way, advertisers get more value out of advertising, and they don't have a need for ads on other platforms. The big problem is not that you don't own all the content that you don't own, but that many of your content is being used. That is not the same as blocking adverts.

danfang 7y ago

I wrote a similar article earlier this month, about the (hopefully) ad-free, tracking-free future of social media: https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-social-networks-look-like-a5fda90cffb7 https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-social-networks... It really lines up well with your points about engagement, advertiser incentives, and political disinformation! Here's to hoping people choose to use/build new social tools that better align with our interests and values.

cm2012 7y ago

It would become much harder for challenger companies to unseat incumbents.

firefoxd 7y ago

Social media banning ads is like a printed newspaper banning ads. The dollar and some you pay for a copy is for the production of the paper and delivery only. What pays for the journalists, the research and all are the ads. Why would they remove the ads? [1] Unfortunately the newspaper industry didn't have much of a say since advertisers found a more lucrative venue online. Now they are shutting down. But social media companies have a say. You can't tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks. Social media is not a public utility. I think they should have all their ads. My suggestion is to follow the less dramatic path of teaching people how to use the internet. I am serious. Most people don't even know they are on the internet when they are on their phone. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism

beerandt 7y ago
Except the content on social is already free.
Koremat6666 7y ago
>u can't tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks. there are plenty of products more than number of newspapers out there, if you are not happy with these platforms you can start your own far to easily too. Just the way newspapers are dying so will facebook, twitter, instagram and many others. We only need for the next big thing to rise. On that day people will lament how awesome was Facebook that helped independent writers, journalists and influencers and how the new thing is ruining the world.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Except all of these things have the same critical flaw; they all depend on advertisements to pay the bills. To get advertisers, they need engaged audiences. To get engaged audiences, they need various social mechanics to drive engagement to an artificially high rate than their service would otherwise have. They also are then incentivized to police content in ways that make the medium more appealing to advertisers. Then eventually people get sick of it, and a new upstart shows up offering a better experience with less advertising. And people move on, until the same factors cause the same cancers to grow in the new one, which eventually cause it's own demise. Ironically, by banning advertisement, you would eliminate one of the biggest drivers of change in social networks that cause them to die. Not all of them, of course, but one of the biggest by far. In a strange twist, you might well save the social network from succumbing to the cancer it's leadership always inflicts upon it. The qualities that make a social network useful for the purpose of allowing social networking are almost completely at odds with the qualities that make it attractive to advertisers, almost to a comical degree: * Privacy controls and default-enabled secure settings hide information from advertisers * Securing people's social circles from advertisers reduces their ability to target * Protecting people's photos from being co-opted for use in apps or scanned for auto-tagging reduces reach * Policing outrageous, clickbait, or controversial content reduces the main clients social networks have for paid promotion Basically, the ideal social network would either charge a base subscription fee and provide an ad-free experience, or would be free, and be entirely subsidized by the Government. I cannot envision a private company willing to provide a user-centered experience that would be a net good for the userbase, because everything the users want and need conflicts with what the network would want to sell to advertisers.

205guy 7y ago

I think the solution is to ban the "algorithm" that determines your feed. People sign up for posts and photos from friends and family and groups, instead that is held hostage and released as a trickle with ads and fake endorsements (your friends like brandX) and targeted stories chosen to trigger emotions and go viral. The feed should go back to being RSS essentially, that's what people really expect out of fb/instagram. Also, just like government sets limits on roadside advertising, online advertising should be limited (area-wise or frequency), with clear distinction and attribution for all ads. In addition, there should be limits to profiling such that ads can't be shown to less than 10K viewers for example.

thelock85 7y ago

It’s kinda interesting that the response to social media ads is “ban them all” when the same targeting system could be used to inform and educate people on how to improve their station (and perhaps in the end, have more money to buy stuff).

erichocean 7y ago

Why limit the ban to social media? I'm for a 100% ban on advertising in all forms across all media with no exceptions.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
You're going to pay for all this formerly free stuff right?

not2b 7y ago

You can't get rid of ads. But ads should be transparent and it should be visible to all that X paid for an ad, sent it to Y group and said Z. That would prevent politicians from, for example, advertising to people on one side of an issue that he is on their side, and to people on the other side of an issue that he is on their side, knowing that neither group will see the other ad. Then they could keep people from doing new last-minute ads right before an election so they can't sneak in whoppers before the honest press can catch them.

Animats 7y ago

Maybe just stop making advertising a tax-deductible business expense. Advertising in the US is negative-sum - the population is mostly spent out, so it doesn't create demand, it just moves it around a bit. But it adds to the price of products. In many cases, more than the price of producing the product. Tax policy should not encourage that.

deafcalculus 7y ago
Not saying this is a bad idea, but how will reduction in ads create more demand? If anything, demand will go down because people working in ads will lose jobs or get paid less.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

laurex 7y ago

There's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. But if the business model is trade users and their data for advertising revenue, there's no chance that the users' best interest can be served. That said, as someone working on social technology where we've expressly decided to not go down that path, it's also clear that the dark patterns that an ad-driven approach lead to are also effective at driving growth. I'm curious how many people will pay rather than have their data collected and sold. My guess is that it takes more than just being ethical to charge for social tech, it takes adding extra value as a product as well. I'm betting my current career on the idea that there is an alternative.