6 ms·

I like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, similar to the way advertising certain products (alcohol, tobacco, medication) is ba

I like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, similar to the way advertising certain products (alcohol, tobacco, medication) is banned in some countries. Sure you can put a sign above the front door of your business, and sure you can buy a slot in the yellow pages, but that's all folks. We'd need different funding models for radio, television and much of the internet, but we're smart, we can figure it out.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
The best concert I ever went to was one I'd never have known about if not for a TV commercial. I don't follow music news and don't drive by the venue to look at the marquee. I hate commercials, they're annoying, I mute/skip them all but that one got through and it's made me consider that you can be too extremist about this like anything else. To an extent, our interests are aligned with advertisers. Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. If there's a new pizza place open on a street I don't drive down, I'd like to know. Another example. I realized I haven't seen anything but already-familiar movies in recent years because I've closed off all avenues to seeing trailers for movies I'm not already sold on.
- janice1999 2y ago
  > Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. You may be intelligent as an individual but your adversary has teams of PhDs, decades of psychological research and tons of personal information on you, now parsed and analysed by AI to target you. Thinking you can see "raw information" is very naive.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    The things you're saying are real on the scale of the entire audience, advertising does work in the aggregate. But I'm stubborn and frugal and skeptical so I'm not buying some new product unless the stars align. I trust myself to be able to hear that it exists from a biased source. Even if you don't believe the claim that X is the best product, it's good to know it exists as a starting point for if/when you ever start research on the options.
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      If you do any groceries in bigger markets, the shelf positioning and location of the aisle is also a part of advertising. Companies pay premiums for some spots.
      - Fluorescence 2y ago
        As a fellow frugal sceptic, that won't impact us much. We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value. I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary. What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!
- cobertos 2y ago
  It'd just be nice if it was consensual. It is resource intensive to try to opt out of/avoid the ad-based society. And you never truly can as some data sharing and ad watching is almost compulsory (video/sound ads at gas pumps). To be fair, I've gotten some great ads for things I never would have found myself, on places like Instagram. And yet I didn't get to choose when or how the ads were delivered.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Cable TV commercials have been more or less consensual since DVRs came out in 1999. Start watching a show late and fast forward the commercials. The internet taking the anonymity and freedom to skip ads away from us is the main problem.
    - tharkun__ 2y ago
      Isn't that the same thing? (Cable) TV ads are not more consensual just because you were using the ad blocker of the time: DVR
- tensor 2y ago
  Advertising should be opt-in, and user tuneable. I avoid advertising in my life as much as possible, but yet, I still find out about all the cool local things going on. How? I use instagram, where I follow things that interest me. The key difference here is that I'm in control. I use it only when I feel like it, I've disabled all its notifications. That said, instagram still has a bunch of obnoxious ads I don't want. It's really not as user tunable as the "opt-in bazar" model should be. But that is the solution, ads should be 100% opt-in. You should be in control of when you want to go browsing vendor wares, and when you do that then sure they can hawk their stuff to you, but otherwise not.
  - M95D 2y ago
    That's called news, not ads.
- Fluorescence 2y ago
  There are perverse incentives at work. Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free. Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.
emchammer 2y ago
In your hypothetical universe, is it legal to have a vending machine in public that says "Drink Slurm: it's highly addictive"?
- euroderf 2y ago
  Depends. Does it have electrolytes ?
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    It cools the HPC clusters.
  - usefulcat 2y ago
    It's what plants crave.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
morsch 2y ago
I think we should just tax it at 100%. Easier than banning it outright.
- notatoad 2y ago
  100% of what? 100% of the potential revenue that the advertising might bring in? that sounds horrifically difficult to implement.
  - usefulcat 2y ago
    100% of the cost of the advertising, presumably.
    - morsch 2y ago
      Exactly.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
>I like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, Don't just imagine. Think. There must be some argument that advertisement isn't the same thing as the "speech" in free speech. I haven't figured it out, but I keep hoping someone else will.
- xigoi 2y ago
  Freedom of speech is about being able to state your opinion, not about being able to say anything, so it should not cover advertising.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    My opinion is that Brawndo is the best drink out there and always for a reasonable price! Brawndo, it's got what plants crave!
graemep 2y ago
There are many different funding models for media: hypothecated taxes, subscriptions, donations, merch... Why does it have to be an alternate universe? I have been thinking the same and there it would not be easy, but it could be done, and even if we had people finding lots of loopholes it would greatly restrict advertising.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Your are missing: interest by individuals, information corporations wants out (no grocery store chain would ever think of putting a paygate on its opening hours), and think tanks. Besides, even in the extreme where no new media is ever created, would that be so bad? Anna's archive has 38 million books. You would be challenged to even read the index in a lifetime.
tomjen3 2y ago
I dream of a world where all advertising is in one place, and where I can go and look up things, when I want to. Where I can type a problem that I have into a bot and then it can show me suggested solutions for that problem: this could be as simple as "my car is too dirty" to "how do I communicate with by grandfather, who is both nearly deaf and not technical enough to send sms?" I don't want ads to show up everywhere, and I don't want them to tell me that they have a solution to my problem _without knowing what my problem is_. I have complained about it before (partly in the wain hope the some facebook engineers will see it), that Facebook does not use the data I freely give it to base its ads on[0], but only what its AI can match me with. In short, I think there is a time and place for me to enter transaction mode - but not with ads that assume their are smarter or know me better than I do, and not when I get interrupted. [0]: I am pretty good at blocking third party tracking, but I did tell them what school I went to, that I studied computer science, and when I did. Any basic human would be able to infer that I might like nerdy things and that I have a relatively high income. FB continually feed me slop ads.
- xigoi 2y ago
  What you’re describing is not advertising, but a search engine.
  - Fargren 2y ago
    Catalogs, which is what he is describing, absolutely are advertising. He just one catalog for everything. A search engine does not only search for products.
smcnally 2y ago
“Banned” means someone else decides what’s considered advertising. Does it include Monday Night Football brought to you by MSFT Surface? The MLB World Series powered by GOOG? Or Pepsi’s American Idol? Stop buying things from advertisers and it will die on its own.
- Fargren 2y ago
  "Vote with your wallet" works for voting for things, but it has an abysmal track record when it comes to voting against things. It only works in the case organized boycotts, and only for a vanishing minority of those.
pembrook 2y ago
It’s amusing to me how I just read a thread on HN where the top comment was about the unintended consequences of regulation resulting in far worse outcomes than the problem they set out to solve. Meanwhile, at the top of this thread, we have someone advocating seizing control of all public speech and media to forcibly eliminate any perceived advertising messaging. With very little thought in the replies paid toward the potential unintended consequences. What could possibly go wrong creating a centralized body to police all speech for perceived commercial intent. I’m sure it would be all roses and sunshine!
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"We'd need different funding models for radio, television and much of the internet." I thought the internet was funded by internet subscriber fees. What are we paying ISPs for. Advertisers do not pay our internet access fees. Any internet subscriber can publish on the internet. No advertisers needed. Owning a radio station or TV channel is expensive and may require funding from advertisers. But an internet subscription is affordable in the same way as a TV set or a radio receiver. If an internet subscriber has a reachable IP address then she can publish.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  There would be minimal content without payment. There would be minimal payment without advertising. People are overwhelmingly unwilling to pay for online content.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  Internet subbscribers routinely produce and publish content to be consumed by other subscribers without payment. (Middlemen calling themselves "tech" companies have created websites to exploit this phenomenon.) For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment. Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

The best concert I ever went to was one I'd never have known about if not for a TV commercial. I don't follow music news and don't drive by the venue to look at the marquee. I hate commercials, they're annoying, I mute/skip them all but that one got through and it's made me consider that you can be too extremist about this like anything else. To an extent, our interests are aligned with advertisers. Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. If there's a new pizza place open on a street I don't drive down, I'd like to know. Another example. I realized I haven't seen anything but already-familiar movies in recent years because I've closed off all avenues to seeing trailers for movies I'm not already sold on.

janice1999 2y ago
> Of course their information is biased, but an intelligent person can cut through that and take just the raw information, which has value. You may be intelligent as an individual but your adversary has teams of PhDs, decades of psychological research and tons of personal information on you, now parsed and analysed by AI to target you. Thinking you can see "raw information" is very naive.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  The things you're saying are real on the scale of the entire audience, advertising does work in the aggregate. But I'm stubborn and frugal and skeptical so I'm not buying some new product unless the stars align. I trust myself to be able to hear that it exists from a biased source. Even if you don't believe the claim that X is the best product, it's good to know it exists as a starting point for if/when you ever start research on the options.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    If you do any groceries in bigger markets, the shelf positioning and location of the aisle is also a part of advertising. Companies pay premiums for some spots.
    - Fluorescence 2y ago
      As a fellow frugal sceptic, that won't impact us much. We get a little buzz dragging the super value pack off a top shelf or knowing that the bottom shelf economy product is actually made in the same factory as the high priced brand. We are the ones standing in the aisle eyes glazed computing the 1g/£ value of a "get one free offer" vs. the family pack no matter how hard supermarkets obfuscate it with different units on each label. It's a contrarian world-view that assumes by default, that eye-level products have the lowest value. I used to humbly assume I must be vulnerable to advertising but I later realised I actually have years of expenses that show otherwise. They show I am a cheap bastard. I don't make impulse purchases, mostly buy fruit and veg, don't buy branded products if it can be avoided and major purchases will be drawn out optimisation processes with spreadsheets and using return processes to compare alternatives if necessary. What I can humbly reveal is that this is no brag, this is no moral virtue, just a personality trait that is not always rational and comes with swings and roundabouts e.g. good opportunities are rejected with suspicion, important purchases are procrastinated and we can make poor use of our time to indulge our psychology e.g. walk 10 minutes to the next store to buy something for 50p cheaper just because being gouged 50p physically hurts!
cobertos 2y ago
It'd just be nice if it was consensual. It is resource intensive to try to opt out of/avoid the ad-based society. And you never truly can as some data sharing and ad watching is almost compulsory (video/sound ads at gas pumps). To be fair, I've gotten some great ads for things I never would have found myself, on places like Instagram. And yet I didn't get to choose when or how the ads were delivered.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Cable TV commercials have been more or less consensual since DVRs came out in 1999. Start watching a show late and fast forward the commercials. The internet taking the anonymity and freedom to skip ads away from us is the main problem.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    Isn't that the same thing? (Cable) TV ads are not more consensual just because you were using the ad blocker of the time: DVR
tensor 2y ago
Advertising should be opt-in, and user tuneable. I avoid advertising in my life as much as possible, but yet, I still find out about all the cool local things going on. How? I use instagram, where I follow things that interest me. The key difference here is that I'm in control. I use it only when I feel like it, I've disabled all its notifications. That said, instagram still has a bunch of obnoxious ads I don't want. It's really not as user tunable as the "opt-in bazar" model should be. But that is the solution, ads should be 100% opt-in. You should be in control of when you want to go browsing vendor wares, and when you do that then sure they can hawk their stuff to you, but otherwise not.
- M95D 2y ago
  That's called news, not ads.
Fluorescence 2y ago
There are perverse incentives at work. Given media is advertising funded, they need it to be necessary. It means they cannot run cultural content that informs you of things of a commercial nature. It would be to give away their revenue generating product for free. Rather than your example showing the advertising-economy is successfully informing you of things, it may show that it has extinguished an entire category of cultural programming that could have kept you entertained and informed without being a pay-to-win manipulation game.

emchammer 2y ago

In your hypothetical universe, is it legal to have a vending machine in public that says "Drink Slurm: it's highly addictive"?

euroderf 2y ago
Depends. Does it have electrolytes ?
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  It cools the HPC clusters.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  It's what plants crave.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

morsch 2y ago

I think we should just tax it at 100%. Easier than banning it outright.

notatoad 2y ago
100% of what? 100% of the potential revenue that the advertising might bring in? that sounds horrifically difficult to implement.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  100% of the cost of the advertising, presumably.
  - morsch 2y ago
    Exactly.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

>I like to imagine an alternate universe in which all advertising is banned, Don't just imagine. Think. There must be some argument that advertisement isn't the same thing as the "speech" in free speech. I haven't figured it out, but I keep hoping someone else will.

xigoi 2y ago
Freedom of speech is about being able to state your opinion, not about being able to say anything, so it should not cover advertising.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  My opinion is that Brawndo is the best drink out there and always for a reasonable price! Brawndo, it's got what plants crave!

graemep 2y ago

There are many different funding models for media: hypothecated taxes, subscriptions, donations, merch... Why does it have to be an alternate universe? I have been thinking the same and there it would not be easy, but it could be done, and even if we had people finding lots of loopholes it would greatly restrict advertising.

tomjen3 2y ago
Your are missing: interest by individuals, information corporations wants out (no grocery store chain would ever think of putting a paygate on its opening hours), and think tanks. Besides, even in the extreme where no new media is ever created, would that be so bad? Anna's archive has 38 million books. You would be challenged to even read the index in a lifetime.

tomjen3 2y ago

I dream of a world where all advertising is in one place, and where I can go and look up things, when I want to. Where I can type a problem that I have into a bot and then it can show me suggested solutions for that problem: this could be as simple as "my car is too dirty" to "how do I communicate with by grandfather, who is both nearly deaf and not technical enough to send sms?" I don't want ads to show up everywhere, and I don't want them to tell me that they have a solution to my problem _without knowing what my problem is_. I have complained about it before (partly in the wain hope the some facebook engineers will see it), that Facebook does not use the data I freely give it to base its ads on[0], but only what its AI can match me with. In short, I think there is a time and place for me to enter transaction mode - but not with ads that assume their are smarter or know me better than I do, and not when I get interrupted. [0]: I am pretty good at blocking third party tracking, but I did tell them what school I went to, that I studied computer science, and when I did. Any basic human would be able to infer that I might like nerdy things and that I have a relatively high income. FB continually feed me slop ads.

xigoi 2y ago
What you’re describing is not advertising, but a search engine.
- Fargren 2y ago
  Catalogs, which is what he is describing, absolutely are advertising. He just one catalog for everything. A search engine does not only search for products.

smcnally 2y ago

“Banned” means someone else decides what’s considered advertising. Does it include Monday Night Football brought to you by MSFT Surface? The MLB World Series powered by GOOG? Or Pepsi’s American Idol? Stop buying things from advertisers and it will die on its own.

Fargren 2y ago
"Vote with your wallet" works for voting for things, but it has an abysmal track record when it comes to voting against things. It only works in the case organized boycotts, and only for a vanishing minority of those.

pembrook 2y ago

It’s amusing to me how I just read a thread on HN where the top comment was about the unintended consequences of regulation resulting in far worse outcomes than the problem they set out to solve. Meanwhile, at the top of this thread, we have someone advocating seizing control of all public speech and media to forcibly eliminate any perceived advertising messaging. With very little thought in the replies paid toward the potential unintended consequences. What could possibly go wrong creating a centralized body to police all speech for perceived commercial intent. I’m sure it would be all roses and sunshine!

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"We'd need different funding models for radio, television and much of the internet." I thought the internet was funded by internet subscriber fees. What are we paying ISPs for. Advertisers do not pay our internet access fees. Any internet subscriber can publish on the internet. No advertisers needed. Owning a radio station or TV channel is expensive and may require funding from advertisers. But an internet subscription is affordable in the same way as a TV set or a radio receiver. If an internet subscriber has a reachable IP address then she can publish.

HDThoreaun 2y ago
There would be minimal content without payment. There would be minimal payment without advertising. People are overwhelmingly unwilling to pay for online content.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Internet subbscribers routinely produce and publish content to be consumed by other subscribers without payment. (Middlemen calling themselves "tech" companies have created websites to exploit this phenomenon.) For example, HN readers are known to enjoy the comments section, perhaps more than the submitted news items themselves. But HN commenters do not get paid for their "content". Many years prior to the existence of so-called "tech" companies, this phenomenon was observable on Usenet. Without advertisers and without payment. Internet users are perhaps unwilling to pay for content published to the internet; they are however willing to publish internet content without payment.