7 ms·

Dream bigger? We could make it illegal to advertise period.

• hn72774 2y ago
  Tax ad revenue as a vice like at alcohol and tobacco levels, or higher.
  • guerrilla 2y ago
    It's not an abused substance, it's violence.
    • immibis 2y ago
      This is not the first time I'm hearing someone say free speech is violence, but it is the first time they actually meant it about free speech and weren't covering up something else by calling it that.
      • hn72774 2y ago
        Not who shared that but there's a concept of non-violent communication that they may be referring to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication Coercion -> force -> violence Forcing ads onto kids = violence?
        • codr7 2y ago
          From my experience, that concept is mostly used as weapon and shield by the worst kind of people, to let them get away with their manipulative bs. Speaking clearly sometimes means saying things that are uncomfortable to hear.
          • hn72774 2y ago
            That sounds more like gaslighting. Non-violent communication isn't at all about manipulation. It's about discussing behaviors and their impact on the person vs attacking and defending in circles that go nowhere.
            • codr7 2y ago
              Yeah, I get the potential, and I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It's just that in practice I've only seen it used by morons to shut down discussions they don't feel like having.
            • whythre 2y ago
              One can couch their words in the language of nonviolence and still be manipulative, cruel or discriminatory. It can and does act as a form of social camouflage, because humans are shitty and a method of communication will not safeguard against predators. You can’t make people harmless, but you can force them to innovate different ways to harm others.
              • codr7 2y ago
                Yeah, but that isn't it at all, I'm afraid. It's much darker. The fact is that exactly the same people who are pushing the idea, are the ones who we would need protection from. And they're not innovating much, it's the same bs over and over and over again.
                • comfysocks 2y ago
                  I don’t think the dynamic you are talking about has much to do with Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. Perhaps a slightly reductive view, but I see “NVC” as basically saying that when people argue, emotions can sometimes overrule logic. When people get emotional, they sometimes plug their ears and start screaming into the void. NVC is then basically a bunch of tactics to circumvent the emotional aspect so that the discussion can get back to logical facts. It also tries to create a framework where the people arguing have to hear the other side’s arguments before making a counter argument. I think the book has some very useful ideas mixed in with some amount of self-promotion. I think the name “Nonviolent Communication” (which might throw some people off) is part of that self-promotion. Don’t let the name fool you.
          • deleted 2y ago
            [deleted]
        • guerrilla 2y ago
          Exactly this.
      • Y_Y 2y ago
        Why is free speech free? If you think people (and by extension businesses) should be allowed to express themselves that's one thing, but advertising is importantly distinct from that. It's protected speech in most of the Anglosphere to say you don't like some person or group, but not to maliciously damage someone's reputation or incite hatred. I can imagine an analogous situation where you're free to express that you think your product is good, but not to incite irrational desire in consumers or try so place information about your product in places that are difficult to avoid, like public billboards.
      • CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
        On free speech vs violent acts of speech (if we want to keep using that term) A possible compromise that might work is to protect _good faith_ speech while working against bad faith speech.
      • smcin 2y ago
        Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been attacking that trope as factually incorrect and unhelpful for almost a decade now: "Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence : A claim increasingly heard on campus will make them more anxious and more willing to justify physical harm." (2017) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-it...
    • spunker540 2y ago
      You do a disservice to anyone actually exposed to real violence. I’m sure they’d prefer advertising to violence any day
      • ssklash 2y ago
        Maybe not violence, but what word more accurately describes the non-consensual exploitation of human psychology for massive profit?
        • Nasrudith 2y ago
          Fraud is closer but still a massive reach.
          • kelnos 2y ago
            IMO advertising is worse than fraud. At least with fraud the impact is usually fairly clear, and not buried in our broken, manipulated, subconscious minds.
            • johnnyanmac 2y ago
              We know so little about out subconscious that this simply seems alarmist. Maybe TV really does rot our brain, maybe it's better to answer kids's questions about everything and expose them to it rather than set age restrictions. Until some substantial info of our brains occur, I can't say the ability to make people aware of products is worse than fraud.
              • ssklash 2y ago
                If all ads did was make you aware of products, we would not be having this discussion. They attempt to hijack deep-seated human urges and tenancies in order to get you to buy their crap. Watch any perfume or cologne commercial and tell me they are simply making you aware that the product exists.
      • deleted 2y ago
    • snapcaster 2y ago
      I hate ads, but this is not a winning argument. Instead of winning people over to the sympathetic cause (nobody really LIKES ads besides google and meta employees) you alienate people
      • sithlord 2y ago
        I would hazard a guess that no one likes ads except the likes of google and meta SHAREHOLDERS).
        • brigadier132 2y ago
          I was incredulous but many normal people actually enjoy ads.
          • dwayne_dibley 2y ago
            I mean they can often be useful.
          • ssklash 2y ago
            Many people have also never experienced a world where ads do not exist. I use so many layers of adblocking that whenever I use a vanilla VM or devices, I'm stunned at how shockingly bad the internet experience is for most people.
      • randomdata 2y ago
        Ads can be likeable under the right conditions. Who doesn't want to learn about something that will actually improve their life? Which is also ideal for advertisers. Who wants to pay to advertise to an audience that doesn't want their product? Google and Facebook, in the early days, thought they could use copious amounts of data to tailor the ads to the user such that they would only be subjected to those which are likeable, but then the audience got skittish about having that much information collected on them. And so we now just get whatever random ad happens to be in the queue – which, indeed, is statistically unlikely to be in line with what you actually need, and therefore unlikable.
  • ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    Limit advertising budgets to some percentage of reported (and taxed) income. Solve multiple problems at once :)
    • briandear 2y ago
      So the big companies can spend more and the startups wouldn’t be able to advertise at all. That’s not solving anything.
      • sham1 2y ago
        Those sorts of taxes could be made progressive. And if one wanted to be really cheeky, the progression could be based on percentages of global revenue. Ads really are a negative externality, and they should really be treated as such.
        • tekknik 2y ago
          take a complex solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem and make it more complex so then it solves it, yet still doesn’t. a less complex solution, let companies like apple do what they do and allow ad blockers and develop an AI feature for removing them. people still seeing ads these days are doing so by choice.
          • ajsnigrutin 2y ago
            > people still seeing ads these days are doing so by choice. Hey, you might not know, but there exists this place called "the outside", where there are no adblockers, no AI, but A LOT of ads. Severly limiting ads would solve that too. Adblocks wouldn't.
            • tekknik 2y ago
              nobody is forcing you to look at anything. unless you’re in Asia, the rest of the world has what, a billboard occasionally?
• FridayoLeary 2y ago
  That is overly simplistic. Advertising is a great way to make people aware of things they may find useful. Without a good method to spread the news no one could sell their innovations. But i do agree that most ads are annoying.
• briandear 2y ago
  A ridiculous concept — the only people that win in that are the incumbent producers. “I make a better widget at a lower price than BigCorp” — yet nobody will ever find out about it because advertising that fact would be illegal. Journalists would become supremely powerful and (more) supremely corrupt. Just like radio DJs in the 20th century determined what music sold (and were often bribed accordingly,) the same thing will happen for literally everything. Journalism would become even more like advertising but people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I don’t want the equivalent of radio DJs determining what products and services win. Many professional sports would disappear, Motorsports, soccer, many olympic sports would cease to exist at the highest level. The Olympics themselves would no longer be broadcast (who would pay for it?) Kid’s little league teams would lose local business sponsors. Everything would be pay-per-view assuming the economics worked at all. Newspapers would all shut down. TV stations would disappear. Radio would be limited to small amateur stations — if that because the moment the host mentions a product, service, song, they’d be sued (wrongly or rightly) for potentially advertising. New restaurants would never survive (how will anyone know you exist: Signage and logos are all advertising.) Basically it would be North Korea with people shopping for inferior state-produced goods at inferior state run supermarkets reading state-approved messages about the greatness of the Dear Leader and his progeny. Even word of mouth referrals would be subject to lawsuits “can you prove you didn’t get a free cookie in exchange for saying something to your friends about this bakery?” An absolutely dystopian nightmare. And if there were an advertising ban, you can bet politicians would exempt themselves from such a ban.
• Terr_ 2y ago
  There may be some more-creative options out there too. For example, in Washington State there isn't a blanket prohibition on signs advertising to people on the highway, but anything advertised must be available for purchase on the property. So far, that's been enough to curb companies from lining the highways with walls of giant billboards. So--just spitballing here--imagine if people had a legal right to use and sell software that blocks ads or objectionable material from their view or on devices they own, and how that could lead to ad-ecosystem changes.
  • mrguyorama 2y ago
    Or you can do like a few different states have done and just fucking ban billboards, and the world doesn't end, and the economy doesn't crash, and the world is an explicitly better place. So much stupid nonsense just to not make the world a better place and I don't understand it. You don't need to be creative. Speaking of which, at this point it's only a matter of time before some big name attempts to put a satellite in orbit that is also a billboard, so you can ALWAYS see their advertising in the nights sky, because it is not currently being used for advertising so, you know, they want to fix that. If we don't ban it now, we WILL have our night sky blocked out by advertising at some point. Companies already use big drone displays to do this. And I guarantee you people will insist "It's not a big deal, we need advertising, we don't need to block all of it"
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      > Or you can [...] just fucking ban billboards I feel this "just do X" formula is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Will you force most gas stations dismantle their price-signs? Will "garage sale here" signs become illegal? What zones are or aren't covered? Vehemence is unfortunately not a substitute for planning or clear rules.
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        And yet several states have done "just" that! You don't even have to figure anything out yourself, you can just copy their frameworks! Why are you so insistent on this? We figured it out decades ago! Don't make up BS reasons to avoid reality, just go read the existing rules. https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/23/title23sec1908.html https://legislature.maine.gov/statutes/23/title23sec1908.htm... Click the buttons at the top of the page to navigate this section of law. Maine has had this all on the internet since the 90s. It's a solved problem.
• kelnos 2y ago
  That really is my dream. Advertising is a blight on humanity. Of course, this would break capitalism. We live in a society where the foundation of the economy requires that people keep buying things, even things they don't really need and don't really want. I happen to think breaking capitalism a bit could be a good thing, but it would likely also cause a period of economic instability that would crush people who are marginal financially.