4 ms·

OK, but how's it different from the current world?

• stickfigure 5y ago
  It would be strictly worse. Advertising is at worst an annoyance. On the other hand, a legally-enforced gatekeeping bureaucracy that decides whose speech is allowed to reach other people is an Orwellean nightmare. Do you trust <insert your opposing political tribe here> to decide which political ads are acceptable? Despite HN's fixation on G and F, there are multitudes of advertising channels both online and offline.
  • brimble 5y ago
    My main concern's dragnet spying and user-targeted (not content-targeted) ads but I do think it'd be nice to get rid of (nearly) all ads, too—it's just that if I can only pick eliminate all ads or eliminate all spying, I'd pick the latter. I think that priority order is why people tend to fixate on big tech, for which the spying is all tied up with the advertising, but I also think magazines selling subscriber lists should be illegal, the CRAs should either be eliminated or much more tightly regulated, credit card companies shouldn't be able to sell your purchase data, et c. No companies should be able to do those things, it's just that Big Tech does a lot of that (but so do financial institutions and so on, sure, and those shouldn't be able to do it either). Separately, yes, it would be nice to at squeeze all advertising down to some very small factor in the economy, if not completely eliminate it (which is probably impractical). [EDIT] But back to the original point, your scary-no-advertising-world post mostly just describes the current state of our has-advertising world.