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Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the b

by harikb 7y ago

Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the business. Are we in a position to regulate them too? Remember that ads existed before internet. They also had the same fundamental problems. Only those days one had to be rich to muck with society

eitland 7y ago
> Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US, Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would still see ads but we would not. However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models like "I pay you money, you provide me service without telling every shady tracker in the process. So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild be next to impossible to enforce and also counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or even my life. But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte applications in my browser. Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb, more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.
lapnitnelav 7y ago
It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business. If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out. It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power. Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.
fires10 7y ago
Is this a case of perfect being the enemy of good?

by harikb 7y ago

eitland 7y ago

> Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US, Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would still see ads but we would not. However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models like "I pay you money, you provide me service without telling every shady tracker in the process. So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild be next to impossible to enforce and also counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or even my life. But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte applications in my browser. Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb, more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.

lapnitnelav 7y ago

It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business. If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out. It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power. Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.

fires10 7y ago

Is this a case of perfect being the enemy of good?