9 ms·

I wish the headline read "Norway wants advertising banned across Europe". I wish society would revolt against the idea that advertising is something that should

by _virtu 3y ago

I wish the headline read "Norway wants advertising banned across Europe". I wish society would revolt against the idea that advertising is something that should be allowed. It's an affront on attention and we now have alternative ways of discovering products and services that we want that weren't possible when advertising first started.

cm2012 3y ago
Banning advertising en masse is basically banning capitalism
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Your point being?
  - mongol 3y ago
    What is the point of this question?
    - gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
      Why is banning capitalism bad? There is a growing by view today that capitalism is an evil thing. It needs to go. The poster is asking why would of it be bad to get rid of capitalism?
      - mongol 3y ago
        Exactly how would you get rid of it? Socialize all private property? Government owns everything? No capital in private hands?
        gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
        Pretty much, yeah.
        cm2012 3y ago
        I would love to bet against you on pretty much anything related to politics, because I think your views are so far divorced from reality.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      I was obtusely pointing out the danger of this sort of argument. If you're a fan of advertising, possibly work in advertising, then "capitalism is advertising" might get people to say "oh, I really like capitalism so I'd better put up with advertising blighting our culture and turning the world into a surveillance nightmare"; but they might instead conclude "is that right? OK, maybe we should get rid of capitalism then", possibly not what an advertising proponent would want to encourage.
- lokar 3y ago
  Modern capitalism predates the modern marketing and advertising industry by 100 years or more.
  - cm2012 3y ago
    "Mass" advertising and Madison Avenue, yes, but their were also many things you'd consider advertising - the first newspapers all had ads. Even before that the typical industrial revolution town square had tons of advertising. Before that it was actual street hawkers. Advertising is just business owners saying "My product exists, look at it, you might find it useful!". Without it, product discovery has to be be a top down directory which means relying on someone's judgement instead of the market, which has basically been shown to be inferior at scale everywhere it's been tried.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Marketing as we know it was invented after Marx.
belinder 3y ago
How do you prevent those alternative ways of discovering products from getting flooded by masqueraded ads?
- perihelions 3y ago
  Prison for shills. And rewards for whistleblowing on illegal ads, garnished from the companies that paid for them. The same incentive mechanism that makes tax enforcement effective [0]. Fundamentally, ad markets can't hide from enforcement, so long as whoever's buying the ads is a commercial entity interacting with the financial system. Which it usually is: the primary reason to buy ads is to boost sales of something that's being sold on the open marketspace, overtly and conspicuously. (If it's being advertised, it must be conspicuous, right?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?usesk... [late edit]: In short—if society wants to ban ads, that's a thing that's enforceable and difficult to evade.
  - echelon 3y ago
    > Prison for shills. And rewards for whistleblowing on illegal ads, garnished from the companies that paid for them. I don't like advertising, but this sounds awful. What counts as "advertising"? Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things? Lots of useful things could not exist without advertising.
    - perihelions 3y ago
      I'm replying to the comment asking about "masqueraded ads", i.e. shills. I'm not putting forward an opinion about what should or shouldn't be lawful, but opining that, should society choose to outlaw (a subset of?) ads, that's certainly an enforceable law. - "Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?" Why should the attention gradient be an auction market?
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ye well I just don't want to risk jail for shilling for Ben and Jerries (the supreme ice cream for any occasion where you don't have guests, since it is so expansive). How would you enforce laws against shills? Doesn't many influencer work for free samples etc? I am way more worried for misuse of such laws than shills in the first place. I'd rather people just don't trust celebrities for consumer advice.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Advertising has been around for more than 2000 years, maybe there is actually some want for it in enough people. To be notified about things without actively looking is not an insane thing to want.
- lambdaba 3y ago
  Make it fully opt-in then.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    How do you make a sign on a shop opt-in?
    - lambdaba 3y ago
      I was thinking about behavioral advertising, but I'm pro banning advertising on all public surfaces too, iirc like in Barcelona. But to your point I guess in the near future with AR.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        So AR will be forced on everyone? Btw., even Barcelona still has names of shops etc. outside.
        lambdaba 3y ago
        Well the "naked" reality is a commons, if you want an advertisement layer you put on your AR device.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        So only tech will tell me in which building something is - sure, force more tech on everyone but complain about advertising.
    - 3y ago
brigadier132 3y ago
What does it even mean to "ban advertising"? It's amazing how people just blurt things out without even thinking about what they are saying. So I can't talk about about any commercial product anymore casually with friends?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Think you may be falling for the composition fallacy. We're speaking colloquially here so there's no expectation that anyone is going to fully explicate everything as if they're writing a piece of legislation. Obviously only certain subsets of commercial communication would be banned in such an action and with the common parlance of what advertising is it should be quite clear to most people here the kind of things that were meant. The person you responded to even alluded to other more consumer friendly modes of advertising that could be tolerated and encouraged.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    People should say what they mean. I waste a lot of time on here arguing with people who actually DO believe their ridiculous statements, so it's always nice in cases such as this where it's discovered later that they were speaking "colloquially" (in other words, imprecisely)
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      At the end of the day there are different levels of precision expected in different context, and there's no changing that. If we had to expend the energy to be precise to legislative levels all the time then no one would bother to speak. You'll have a much better time of you adjust your expectations to meet the likely reality rather than beating your head against it.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  What has that to do with advertising? That's the opposite likely, like a real recommendation or at least objective evaluation from an unbiased trusted person?
JaggerJo 3y ago
+1 I’d love to ban ads from public spaces and most of the internet.
olalonde 3y ago
That's a privileged perspective. For a lot of people, watching ads is much preferable to paying and in many cases, paying isn't even possible (e.g. lack of a credit card).
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  That assumes that advertising has no harmful effect, but would it be the same if one said "living in a heavily air polluted city is better than being homeless" or similar?
  - FredPret 3y ago
    And let me guess - you are going to be the judge of which ads are how harmful, and which air is safe to breathe? That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices. Who is making which choice, exactly? I don't get to decide which adverts are presented to me. Best I can do is install ad blockers and get almost all of them… or campaign for laws. Governments already have some rules about what is and isn't allowed in advertising, and block certain categories entirely — for example, the UK bans all cigarette advertising everywhere. I don't know about the USA; I assume liquor and gambling have some rules, but that's just an assumption.
    - throwbadubadu 3y ago
      All undesired&unwanted attention grabbing ones, simple. If one opts in to getting an overview of new things, or just trash, that's fine (so yeah, I think also all in public spaces). Personally, I really don't ever needed and will ever need them. I'd prefer just going for good objective test magazines / trusted reviews / known people recommendations if I have the need for something. Yes, that's just my view and personal dream ;) Anyway, the industry so far imo just brings >95% harm and bad and unnecessary stuff over humanity, and grabs my attention unasked everywhere, even where I kind of didn't opt in. What btw about laws where certain advertisements were forbidden, e.g. alcohol or tobacco, or lottery, also in western countries.. that's not authoritarian but protecting children, right at least?
colmmacc 3y ago
We generally believe and accept what we encounter repeatedly. Our truth building faculties are premised on nature. The river always swells after a big rain. Advertising and propaganda exploit this and can cement false "truths" in our culture and consciousness. But I wonder if modern brand advertising is even more powerful. "Familiarity" and "Familial" share the same root. Our children resemble ourselves and our relatives. When I see my son's smile, I see my father's. When he giggles, I hear my wife's laugh. In history, our villages and regions are more self-similar than any two random people in the world. Inwardly, these similarities and recognitions trigger love and care, and outwardly they play a role in sustaining familial and cultural trust. We should always question and challenge that role, and increase our circle of empathy, it is repugnant to justify racism as some do with this line of reasoning. But the effects are there and it is counterproductive that by selling prominence and placement which even our own families can't match, we allow brands to purchase a kind of kinship.
FredPret 3y ago
I wish economics and entrepreneurship, the lifeblood of the modern world, were mandatory subjects in school. It's more important to understand how democracies, governments, and business work than to understand long division. The reality is we need advertising to enable discoverability. No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times. If you like earning a living and ensuring your physical safety using your mind rather than physical bulk, you need to understand that this is only possible in an economy that is partially idea-based. How can this work if ideas and information aren't allowed to spread? How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?
- hkt 3y ago
  No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times. That is a little bit absurd. Maybe the person you're talking about is on to something. Why not ban advertising? We could just list products and services in directories as is done with small business. It'd let startups compete more effectively by placing them next to the offerings of behemoths, with no presentational difference between the two. It'd be an amazing leveller between capital intensive enterprises and the rest. (That's also probably why it won't happen)
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Why not ban utopian authoritarians? We could simply list each plan for how society must function along with it's cost in taxes and then pick which plan we'd like to pay for / obey. Or we could do away with the sinister notion that there is someone with the natural authority to ban things like this.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      >Why not ban utopian authoritarians? Because we can’t ban everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t earnestly try. It’s not a viable option, but the lesson must be relearned every generation or so. It’s always self-nullifying. People want safety, but need freedom.
    - 3y ago
libraryatnight 3y ago
It feels like yet another thing we take to a dark place that doesn't have to be, but for it not to be it requires individuals to care enough about a cultural good over monetary gain. Like, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know "I'm here, I do/sell a thing. Here's why I'm objectively different than where you get that thing now" The problem in my mind is we start lying, we manipulate, we use each others weakness and vulnerability against each other, and we want infinite growth/results. Surely in business and society there's a sort of happy medium where you serve a need to your community and the community pays a fair price that enables a reasonable living at minimum? But to me it seems you achieve that not by banning, but in a perfect world by creating a culture that doesn't abuse itself, and in a more realistic world I suppose attempting to legislate rules and guidelines that protect the general public from the money addicted.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  The “manipulation” aspect of online advertising is significantly overstated by the modern media. The vast majority of it is simply making you aware of some product you were not aware existed in the first place.
throwaway94373 3y ago
What's wrong with advertising in general exactly? Is it such an immoral act to want to share the news that you are selling a new cool product? Are "Show HN:" threads immoral too? The way I see it it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers; good for companies/artisans, good for consumers, good for the economy, good for the spread of new technology, good for the environment (second hand marketplaces).
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  > it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers This is so outlandish that I feel you almost must be trolling. It's explicitly not consentual. I don't want to see ads. Any ads. Any ads at all. Never. I would be perfectly happy never seeing a single ad in my life and I am 100% confident that I would never regret that choice. I go to great lengths to make myself as annoying as possible to advertisers, making gdpr requests, using browsers that refuse all cookies even when it means I have to constantly sign in and/or automate consent forms, asking for breakdowns of all data stored on me etc. Despite all this, I still see at least two or three dozen ads every day.
  - omgmajk 3y ago
    I agree with most of what you say but I don't know how you manage to see that amount of ads. I use a couple of browser plugins and generally I don't see more than maybe five ads a day, not counting sponsor spots in youtube videos (which I could remove with even more plugins but meh).
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      It's highly variable. Some days id see none online, some days id see three dozen. Depends if I have to use certain websites like facebook, linkedin, etc. However it's fairly consistent that on my short walk to work ill see two or three ads plastered on busses (well usually several per bus but we'll be kind and count them as one), and maybe a dozen adverts on the side of buildings, billboards, adverts and bus stops, random advert screens on the pavement, and more. I'll also often see posters for upcoming concerts and stickers for local shops and venues attached to lampposts, electrical boxes, walls, the floor, any surface. Often they are layered on top of older ones several deep. The posters are fine, honestly even a little charming by their lack of permanence and by comparison to the offensive eyesore digital screens exhorting me to buy junk food I have already heard of pretty much every day for my entire life. But I wouldn't miss them. I can find lists of all upcoming concerts in my area with no effort at all.
gtowey 3y ago
Advertising is a psychological war where thousands of experts in the art of manipulation combined with hundreds of years of learning and research funded by dump trucks of money are against you alone.
KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y ago
I have read that before the French Revolution there was some sort of advertising ban in France -- creating needs where none really existed I guess. Would welcome comments from someone who knows more about this.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Wow, you have no idea how deep the ramifications of that would be, do you? Let's say you need a toothbrush. Where do you buy it? At the store. Okay, but there's a problem. How did the company that owns the store choose which toothbrushes to carry on its store shelves? Was inter-corporate advertising involved? Is that illegal under your scheme? Or maybe the manufacturer paid the store for shelf space. Is paying for physical product space meaningfully different from paying for billboard space? If the shelf space is legal in your utopia, then can the billboard be legal, as long as it only features a bland iPhone 4 photo of the product, along with the product name in a monospaced font (wouldn't want to AdVerTiZe!). Or is all of this disgusting to you, and you want a government agency that tracks finds product vendors and produces a huge book of products that you can peruse, but, all of them are listed without any embellishment, so you have to compare toothbrushes on raw metrics like length, with, plastic composition, angle of attack, bristle circumference, mouth feel, water retention, etc. and then you order it directly from the government.
- InSteady 3y ago
  > so you have to compare toothbrushes on raw metrics like length, with, plastic composition, angle of attack, bristle circumference, mouth feel, water retention, etc. Dear god, please save us from having clear, concise, and honest product information to inform our purchasing decisions. In this hellish existence, I might not even be able to know by default which toothbrush will make people think highly of me.
chrisoconnell 3y ago
Honestly, advertising is not inherently evil. Putting a sign out front of your business with your logo is advertising, though it also helps your customers find you. You are advertising your location. How would you know where a restaurant is or what it serves if they did not have a logo or a menu located outside on their window? All of this is advertising. What is immoral is advertising that holds your attention hostage. Advertising should be able to be rejected, or skipped. I don't have to read a billboard. I don't want to stare at it for 5 seconds before saying "Skip Billboard". I just don't look at it. Instagram does a great job of this with Reels. I can just swipe past a reel that's an ad. I can't even tell you what the last ad I saw on Instagram was, period. In my opinion, advertising should be an inefficient way of communicating your services / products. Commercials, in-stream ads, popups, anything that forces you to interact with an advertisement should be banned, and any personalization of advertisements should also be banned.
- chrisoconnell 3y ago
  It's interesting though, to imagine a dystopian future where instead of red lights, we are stopped by ads that we must watch before progressing through an intersection, and the advertisements are spaced perfectly to control traffic patterns. Samsung should hire me to design their next smart city, imo.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Advertising never holds your attention hostage because you never have to use the service with advertising.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulcole 3y ago
> I wish society would revolt against the idea that advertising is something that should be allowed Look in the mirror bud. You joined a site that’s a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC firm 10 years ago and have commented dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times.

by _virtu 3y ago

cm2012 3y ago

Banning advertising en masse is basically banning capitalism

jjgreen 3y ago
Your point being?
- mongol 3y ago
  What is the point of this question?
  - gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
    Why is banning capitalism bad? There is a growing by view today that capitalism is an evil thing. It needs to go. The poster is asking why would of it be bad to get rid of capitalism?
    - mongol 3y ago
      Exactly how would you get rid of it? Socialize all private property? Government owns everything? No capital in private hands?
      - gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
        Pretty much, yeah.
        cm2012 3y ago
        I would love to bet against you on pretty much anything related to politics, because I think your views are so far divorced from reality.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    I was obtusely pointing out the danger of this sort of argument. If you're a fan of advertising, possibly work in advertising, then "capitalism is advertising" might get people to say "oh, I really like capitalism so I'd better put up with advertising blighting our culture and turning the world into a surveillance nightmare"; but they might instead conclude "is that right? OK, maybe we should get rid of capitalism then", possibly not what an advertising proponent would want to encourage.
lokar 3y ago
Modern capitalism predates the modern marketing and advertising industry by 100 years or more.
- cm2012 3y ago
  "Mass" advertising and Madison Avenue, yes, but their were also many things you'd consider advertising - the first newspapers all had ads. Even before that the typical industrial revolution town square had tons of advertising. Before that it was actual street hawkers. Advertising is just business owners saying "My product exists, look at it, you might find it useful!". Without it, product discovery has to be be a top down directory which means relying on someone's judgement instead of the market, which has basically been shown to be inferior at scale everywhere it's been tried.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Marketing as we know it was invented after Marx.

belinder 3y ago

How do you prevent those alternative ways of discovering products from getting flooded by masqueraded ads?

perihelions 3y ago
Prison for shills. And rewards for whistleblowing on illegal ads, garnished from the companies that paid for them. The same incentive mechanism that makes tax enforcement effective [0]. Fundamentally, ad markets can't hide from enforcement, so long as whoever's buying the ads is a commercial entity interacting with the financial system. Which it usually is: the primary reason to buy ads is to boost sales of something that's being sold on the open marketspace, overtly and conspicuously. (If it's being advertised, it must be conspicuous, right?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?usesk... [late edit]: In short—if society wants to ban ads, that's a thing that's enforceable and difficult to evade.
- echelon 3y ago
  > Prison for shills. And rewards for whistleblowing on illegal ads, garnished from the companies that paid for them. I don't like advertising, but this sounds awful. What counts as "advertising"? Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things? Lots of useful things could not exist without advertising.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    I'm replying to the comment asking about "masqueraded ads", i.e. shills. I'm not putting forward an opinion about what should or shouldn't be lawful, but opining that, should society choose to outlaw (a subset of?) ads, that's certainly an enforceable law. - "Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?" Why should the attention gradient be an auction market?
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Ye well I just don't want to risk jail for shilling for Ben and Jerries (the supreme ice cream for any occasion where you don't have guests, since it is so expansive). How would you enforce laws against shills? Doesn't many influencer work for free samples etc? I am way more worried for misuse of such laws than shills in the first place. I'd rather people just don't trust celebrities for consumer advice.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Advertising has been around for more than 2000 years, maybe there is actually some want for it in enough people. To be notified about things without actively looking is not an insane thing to want.

lambdaba 3y ago
Make it fully opt-in then.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  How do you make a sign on a shop opt-in?
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    I was thinking about behavioral advertising, but I'm pro banning advertising on all public surfaces too, iirc like in Barcelona. But to your point I guess in the near future with AR.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      So AR will be forced on everyone? Btw., even Barcelona still has names of shops etc. outside.
      - lambdaba 3y ago
        Well the "naked" reality is a commons, if you want an advertisement layer you put on your AR device.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        So only tech will tell me in which building something is - sure, force more tech on everyone but complain about advertising.
  - 3y ago

brigadier132 3y ago

What does it even mean to "ban advertising"? It's amazing how people just blurt things out without even thinking about what they are saying. So I can't talk about about any commercial product anymore casually with friends?

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Think you may be falling for the composition fallacy. We're speaking colloquially here so there's no expectation that anyone is going to fully explicate everything as if they're writing a piece of legislation. Obviously only certain subsets of commercial communication would be banned in such an action and with the common parlance of what advertising is it should be quite clear to most people here the kind of things that were meant. The person you responded to even alluded to other more consumer friendly modes of advertising that could be tolerated and encouraged.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  People should say what they mean. I waste a lot of time on here arguing with people who actually DO believe their ridiculous statements, so it's always nice in cases such as this where it's discovered later that they were speaking "colloquially" (in other words, imprecisely)
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    At the end of the day there are different levels of precision expected in different context, and there's no changing that. If we had to expend the energy to be precise to legislative levels all the time then no one would bother to speak. You'll have a much better time of you adjust your expectations to meet the likely reality rather than beating your head against it.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
What has that to do with advertising? That's the opposite likely, like a real recommendation or at least objective evaluation from an unbiased trusted person?

JaggerJo 3y ago

+1 I’d love to ban ads from public spaces and most of the internet.

olalonde 3y ago

That's a privileged perspective. For a lot of people, watching ads is much preferable to paying and in many cases, paying isn't even possible (e.g. lack of a credit card).

throwbadubadu 3y ago
That assumes that advertising has no harmful effect, but would it be the same if one said "living in a heavily air polluted city is better than being homeless" or similar?
- FredPret 3y ago
  And let me guess - you are going to be the judge of which ads are how harmful, and which air is safe to breathe? That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices. Who is making which choice, exactly? I don't get to decide which adverts are presented to me. Best I can do is install ad blockers and get almost all of them… or campaign for laws. Governments already have some rules about what is and isn't allowed in advertising, and block certain categories entirely — for example, the UK bans all cigarette advertising everywhere. I don't know about the USA; I assume liquor and gambling have some rules, but that's just an assumption.
  - throwbadubadu 3y ago
    All undesired&unwanted attention grabbing ones, simple. If one opts in to getting an overview of new things, or just trash, that's fine (so yeah, I think also all in public spaces). Personally, I really don't ever needed and will ever need them. I'd prefer just going for good objective test magazines / trusted reviews / known people recommendations if I have the need for something. Yes, that's just my view and personal dream ;) Anyway, the industry so far imo just brings >95% harm and bad and unnecessary stuff over humanity, and grabs my attention unasked everywhere, even where I kind of didn't opt in. What btw about laws where certain advertisements were forbidden, e.g. alcohol or tobacco, or lottery, also in western countries.. that's not authoritarian but protecting children, right at least?

colmmacc 3y ago

We generally believe and accept what we encounter repeatedly. Our truth building faculties are premised on nature. The river always swells after a big rain. Advertising and propaganda exploit this and can cement false "truths" in our culture and consciousness. But I wonder if modern brand advertising is even more powerful. "Familiarity" and "Familial" share the same root. Our children resemble ourselves and our relatives. When I see my son's smile, I see my father's. When he giggles, I hear my wife's laugh. In history, our villages and regions are more self-similar than any two random people in the world. Inwardly, these similarities and recognitions trigger love and care, and outwardly they play a role in sustaining familial and cultural trust. We should always question and challenge that role, and increase our circle of empathy, it is repugnant to justify racism as some do with this line of reasoning. But the effects are there and it is counterproductive that by selling prominence and placement which even our own families can't match, we allow brands to purchase a kind of kinship.

FredPret 3y ago

I wish economics and entrepreneurship, the lifeblood of the modern world, were mandatory subjects in school. It's more important to understand how democracies, governments, and business work than to understand long division. The reality is we need advertising to enable discoverability. No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times. If you like earning a living and ensuring your physical safety using your mind rather than physical bulk, you need to understand that this is only possible in an economy that is partially idea-based. How can this work if ideas and information aren't allowed to spread? How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?

hkt 3y ago
No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times. That is a little bit absurd. Maybe the person you're talking about is on to something. Why not ban advertising? We could just list products and services in directories as is done with small business. It'd let startups compete more effectively by placing them next to the offerings of behemoths, with no presentational difference between the two. It'd be an amazing leveller between capital intensive enterprises and the rest. (That's also probably why it won't happen)
- FredPret 3y ago
  Why not ban utopian authoritarians? We could simply list each plan for how society must function along with it's cost in taxes and then pick which plan we'd like to pay for / obey. Or we could do away with the sinister notion that there is someone with the natural authority to ban things like this.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    >Why not ban utopian authoritarians? Because we can’t ban everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t earnestly try. It’s not a viable option, but the lesson must be relearned every generation or so. It’s always self-nullifying. People want safety, but need freedom.
  - 3y ago

libraryatnight 3y ago

It feels like yet another thing we take to a dark place that doesn't have to be, but for it not to be it requires individuals to care enough about a cultural good over monetary gain. Like, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know "I'm here, I do/sell a thing. Here's why I'm objectively different than where you get that thing now" The problem in my mind is we start lying, we manipulate, we use each others weakness and vulnerability against each other, and we want infinite growth/results. Surely in business and society there's a sort of happy medium where you serve a need to your community and the community pays a fair price that enables a reasonable living at minimum? But to me it seems you achieve that not by banning, but in a perfect world by creating a culture that doesn't abuse itself, and in a more realistic world I suppose attempting to legislate rules and guidelines that protect the general public from the money addicted.

whimsicalism 3y ago
The “manipulation” aspect of online advertising is significantly overstated by the modern media. The vast majority of it is simply making you aware of some product you were not aware existed in the first place.

throwaway94373 3y ago

What's wrong with advertising in general exactly? Is it such an immoral act to want to share the news that you are selling a new cool product? Are "Show HN:" threads immoral too? The way I see it it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers; good for companies/artisans, good for consumers, good for the economy, good for the spread of new technology, good for the environment (second hand marketplaces).

RugnirViking 3y ago
> it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers This is so outlandish that I feel you almost must be trolling. It's explicitly not consentual. I don't want to see ads. Any ads. Any ads at all. Never. I would be perfectly happy never seeing a single ad in my life and I am 100% confident that I would never regret that choice. I go to great lengths to make myself as annoying as possible to advertisers, making gdpr requests, using browsers that refuse all cookies even when it means I have to constantly sign in and/or automate consent forms, asking for breakdowns of all data stored on me etc. Despite all this, I still see at least two or three dozen ads every day.
- omgmajk 3y ago
  I agree with most of what you say but I don't know how you manage to see that amount of ads. I use a couple of browser plugins and generally I don't see more than maybe five ads a day, not counting sponsor spots in youtube videos (which I could remove with even more plugins but meh).
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    It's highly variable. Some days id see none online, some days id see three dozen. Depends if I have to use certain websites like facebook, linkedin, etc. However it's fairly consistent that on my short walk to work ill see two or three ads plastered on busses (well usually several per bus but we'll be kind and count them as one), and maybe a dozen adverts on the side of buildings, billboards, adverts and bus stops, random advert screens on the pavement, and more. I'll also often see posters for upcoming concerts and stickers for local shops and venues attached to lampposts, electrical boxes, walls, the floor, any surface. Often they are layered on top of older ones several deep. The posters are fine, honestly even a little charming by their lack of permanence and by comparison to the offensive eyesore digital screens exhorting me to buy junk food I have already heard of pretty much every day for my entire life. But I wouldn't miss them. I can find lists of all upcoming concerts in my area with no effort at all.

gtowey 3y ago

Advertising is a psychological war where thousands of experts in the art of manipulation combined with hundreds of years of learning and research funded by dump trucks of money are against you alone.

KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y ago

I have read that before the French Revolution there was some sort of advertising ban in France -- creating needs where none really existed I guess. Would welcome comments from someone who knows more about this.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Wow, you have no idea how deep the ramifications of that would be, do you? Let's say you need a toothbrush. Where do you buy it? At the store. Okay, but there's a problem. How did the company that owns the store choose which toothbrushes to carry on its store shelves? Was inter-corporate advertising involved? Is that illegal under your scheme? Or maybe the manufacturer paid the store for shelf space. Is paying for physical product space meaningfully different from paying for billboard space? If the shelf space is legal in your utopia, then can the billboard be legal, as long as it only features a bland iPhone 4 photo of the product, along with the product name in a monospaced font (wouldn't want to AdVerTiZe!). Or is all of this disgusting to you, and you want a government agency that tracks finds product vendors and produces a huge book of products that you can peruse, but, all of them are listed without any embellishment, so you have to compare toothbrushes on raw metrics like length, with, plastic composition, angle of attack, bristle circumference, mouth feel, water retention, etc. and then you order it directly from the government.

InSteady 3y ago
> so you have to compare toothbrushes on raw metrics like length, with, plastic composition, angle of attack, bristle circumference, mouth feel, water retention, etc. Dear god, please save us from having clear, concise, and honest product information to inform our purchasing decisions. In this hellish existence, I might not even be able to know by default which toothbrush will make people think highly of me.

chrisoconnell 3y ago

Honestly, advertising is not inherently evil. Putting a sign out front of your business with your logo is advertising, though it also helps your customers find you. You are advertising your location. How would you know where a restaurant is or what it serves if they did not have a logo or a menu located outside on their window? All of this is advertising. What is immoral is advertising that holds your attention hostage. Advertising should be able to be rejected, or skipped. I don't have to read a billboard. I don't want to stare at it for 5 seconds before saying "Skip Billboard". I just don't look at it. Instagram does a great job of this with Reels. I can just swipe past a reel that's an ad. I can't even tell you what the last ad I saw on Instagram was, period. In my opinion, advertising should be an inefficient way of communicating your services / products. Commercials, in-stream ads, popups, anything that forces you to interact with an advertisement should be banned, and any personalization of advertisements should also be banned.

chrisoconnell 3y ago
It's interesting though, to imagine a dystopian future where instead of red lights, we are stopped by ads that we must watch before progressing through an intersection, and the advertisements are spaced perfectly to control traffic patterns. Samsung should hire me to design their next smart city, imo.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Advertising never holds your attention hostage because you never have to use the service with advertising.

deleted 3y ago

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paulcole 3y ago

> I wish society would revolt against the idea that advertising is something that should be allowed Look in the mirror bud. You joined a site that’s a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC firm 10 years ago and have commented dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times.