7 ms·

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad plat

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, and by making alternatives accessible to customers, without relying solely on monopolistic platforms or the randomness of word-of-mouth. That said, today’s ad ecosystem is far from ideal - often opaque, invasive, and manipulative. Still, the underlying idea of advertising has real value. Fair advertising is a hard problem, and while reform is overdue, banning it outright would likely create even bigger ones.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it—but it’s also a necessary evil. At one time, definitely. Now though? We all carry around all of humanity's collective knowledge in our pockets. If you need a solution to a problem you have, if you need a plumber, if you need a new car... you an get unlimited information for the asking. I don't remember the last time I responded to an advertisement. If I need things, I search Amazon/Etsy/local retailer apps or just go to a store. If I need contractors, I check local review pages to find good ones or just call ones I've used before. And some of that I guess you could call ads, but I mean in the traditional sense, where someone has paid to have someone put a product in front of me that I wasn't already looking for? Nah. Never happens.
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  Review pages are often ad based. Unless you paid for it. But I still think having to pay for reviews is a better option. That way the reviews are the product not me.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Well some of this is a gray area right? If you have a listing website for example that lists all the electricians in a given geographic area, that's technically an ad, but you'd assume someone wouldn't be looking at the page unless they were looking for an electrician. I wouldn't call that intrusive or unpleasant or worthy of a ban and I don't think anyone would.
- hedayet 2y ago
  1. Discovery For known problems, sure! we probably don’t need ads anymore. But for unknown problems, we still do. When you're not even aware that a solution exists, or that your current approach could be improved, advertising can spark that initial awareness. At that stage, you don’t even know what to search for. 2. Competition If you know better alternatives might exist, yes, you can search for them. But how do you search for better deals, services, or products for every little thing in your life? You don’t. Nobody has the time (or cognitive bandwidth) to proactively research every option. When done right, advertising helps level the playing field by putting alternatives in front of customers. And in doing so, it also pushes businesses to keep their offerings competitive.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    #1 was true, but I find that this is one area where LLMs shine: even when you can't trust the answers directly, they can give inspiration to find the right questions. I'm not convinced #2 is true — all ads imply the thing advertised is the best deal (where "best" is somewhere on cheap-quality spectrum), and the same limits to cognitive bandwidth mean we can't easily guess whatever points were missing from, at best, a 30-second highlights reel.
- gmoot 2y ago
  Your access to all of that collective knowledge is funded by ad revenue.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    So fund it in a way less corrosive to the human experience.
  - 3971671613 2y ago
    Wikipedia isn't funded by ad revenue. Kagi isn't funded by ad revenue. Anna's Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. The Internet Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. You can torrent all the knowledge you'll ever need and all you need is an internet connection. I think we would be fine without ads.
lukev 2y ago
I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.
  - drilbo 2y ago
    well, web search is one thing that would look very different
  - milesrout 2y ago
    IDK what your community is like but if a new restaurant opened a block away from me then: 1. Every one would see it, because they have eyes and leave the house. 2. Every one would be talking about it.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      it is 2025, no one just leaves the house. my wife leaves the house once per week for an hour to go to cosco :)
- hedayet 2y ago
  Theoretically: yes. Realistically: no, you can’t stop big companies from advertising. Just having multiple shops bearing your logo gives you a level of brand recognition that’s hard to beat. Even if no one advertised, they’d still find ways to dominate the conversation and outshine competitors through sheer presence. You’re right that it becomes a kind of arms race, but in practice, trying to "opt out" often means falling behind.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
> It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. Do they not buy up more advertising too? Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything
- hedayet 2y ago
  > That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. That's a bit of a strawman argument. > ...Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything. I agree - some reform is necessary. The current system often exacerbates the imbalance, but completely dismissing advertising ignores its potential role in leveling the playing field for smaller players when done responsibly.
  - glacier5674 2y ago
    Sometimes the man really is made out of straw.
gist 2y ago
I don't think it should be referred to as a 'necessary evil' (by the following definition of that term): "something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result" For one thing the term 'advertising' is broad same as many words (ie 'Doctor' or 'Computer guy' or 'Educator'). Second it's not unpleasant although like with anything some of it could be. (Some of it is funny and entertaining). > Advertising has consequences Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside. Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements. As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves: https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-industry-marketing/what-do-tobacco-advertising-restrictions-look-today https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
georgelyon 2y ago
The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product. There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.
- massysett 2y ago
  Businesses will then send the discoverers free samples, provide literature, and send “advisers” to talk with the discoverers, and you’ll be right back where you started.
  - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
    Is it a consideration with monetary value? Then it’s advertising, much like how bribing public official is still (theoretically) illegal even if you don’t do it in cash. If it’s not, then the discoverer has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand.
    - massysett 2y ago
      I’m not understanding why this is a good standard: right now, anyone who sees a billboard or a TV ad has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand, yet you want to ban those. So you think it would be OK to advertise to discoverers, but not to final purchasers.
      - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
        In the billboard case, the consideration is not between the viewer and the advertiser, it’s between the advertiser and the landowner.
      - georgelyon 2y ago
        For the record, I’m not saying this is the perfect model and we should move to it immediately. My only claim is that it isn’t crazy. I think the fundamental difference between advertising to discoverers vs advertising to consumers is that currently “discoverers” (platforms, content creators, billboard owners, etc.) make money directly from advertisers. Success as a “discoverer” is at least somewhat correlated to income (with more money, platforms can be more successful; content creators can create more compelling content; landowners can buy more billboards). If that money is coming from advertisers, you are biasing the market to prefer discoverers that can secure the most advertiser funding, which in turn preferences advertisers that can spend the most on advertising. This isn’t fundamentally bad, since a compelling product can make a lot of money that can then be spend on advertising, but it also creates anti-consumer incentives (like marketing something that is just good enough not to return as the next best thing). On the other hand, if discoverers are paid directly by consumers, that biases the market to prefer discoverers who identify products that bring the most value to consumers for their money.
kiicia 2y ago
Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you... It doesn't actually work like that. A/B tests learn the highest-yielding ad. Psychology isn't robust enough to actually predict these things.
petra 2y ago
For discovery of niche products,The Google search ads(without spying) system is a great solution. The issues of monopoly should be handled of course. And regarding word of mouth: Is word of mouth for great products really random?

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it—but it’s also a necessary evil. At one time, definitely. Now though? We all carry around all of humanity's collective knowledge in our pockets. If you need a solution to a problem you have, if you need a plumber, if you need a new car... you an get unlimited information for the asking. I don't remember the last time I responded to an advertisement. If I need things, I search Amazon/Etsy/local retailer apps or just go to a store. If I need contractors, I check local review pages to find good ones or just call ones I've used before. And some of that I guess you could call ads, but I mean in the traditional sense, where someone has paid to have someone put a product in front of me that I wasn't already looking for? Nah. Never happens.

galangalalgol 2y ago
Review pages are often ad based. Unless you paid for it. But I still think having to pay for reviews is a better option. That way the reviews are the product not me.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Well some of this is a gray area right? If you have a listing website for example that lists all the electricians in a given geographic area, that's technically an ad, but you'd assume someone wouldn't be looking at the page unless they were looking for an electrician. I wouldn't call that intrusive or unpleasant or worthy of a ban and I don't think anyone would.
hedayet 2y ago
1. Discovery For known problems, sure! we probably don’t need ads anymore. But for unknown problems, we still do. When you're not even aware that a solution exists, or that your current approach could be improved, advertising can spark that initial awareness. At that stage, you don’t even know what to search for. 2. Competition If you know better alternatives might exist, yes, you can search for them. But how do you search for better deals, services, or products for every little thing in your life? You don’t. Nobody has the time (or cognitive bandwidth) to proactively research every option. When done right, advertising helps level the playing field by putting alternatives in front of customers. And in doing so, it also pushes businesses to keep their offerings competitive.
- ben_w 2y ago
  #1 was true, but I find that this is one area where LLMs shine: even when you can't trust the answers directly, they can give inspiration to find the right questions. I'm not convinced #2 is true — all ads imply the thing advertised is the best deal (where "best" is somewhere on cheap-quality spectrum), and the same limits to cognitive bandwidth mean we can't easily guess whatever points were missing from, at best, a 30-second highlights reel.
gmoot 2y ago
Your access to all of that collective knowledge is funded by ad revenue.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  So fund it in a way less corrosive to the human experience.
- 3971671613 2y ago
  Wikipedia isn't funded by ad revenue. Kagi isn't funded by ad revenue. Anna's Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. The Internet Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. You can torrent all the knowledge you'll ever need and all you need is an internet connection. I think we would be fine without ads.

lukev 2y ago

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

logicchains 2y ago
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.
- drilbo 2y ago
  well, web search is one thing that would look very different
- milesrout 2y ago
  IDK what your community is like but if a new restaurant opened a block away from me then: 1. Every one would see it, because they have eyes and leave the house. 2. Every one would be talking about it.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    it is 2025, no one just leaves the house. my wife leaves the house once per week for an hour to go to cosco :)
hedayet 2y ago
Theoretically: yes. Realistically: no, you can’t stop big companies from advertising. Just having multiple shops bearing your logo gives you a level of brand recognition that’s hard to beat. Even if no one advertised, they’d still find ways to dominate the conversation and outshine competitors through sheer presence. You’re right that it becomes a kind of arms race, but in practice, trying to "opt out" often means falling behind.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

> It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. Do they not buy up more advertising too? Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything

hedayet 2y ago
> That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. That's a bit of a strawman argument. > ...Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything. I agree - some reform is necessary. The current system often exacerbates the imbalance, but completely dismissing advertising ignores its potential role in leveling the playing field for smaller players when done responsibly.
- glacier5674 2y ago
  Sometimes the man really is made out of straw.

gist 2y ago

I don't think it should be referred to as a 'necessary evil' (by the following definition of that term): "something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result" For one thing the term 'advertising' is broad same as many words (ie 'Doctor' or 'Computer guy' or 'Educator'). Second it's not unpleasant although like with anything some of it could be. (Some of it is funny and entertaining). > Advertising has consequences Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside. Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements. As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves: https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-industry-marketing/what-do-tobacco-advertising-restrictions-look-today https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...

georgelyon 2y ago

The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product. There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.

massysett 2y ago
Businesses will then send the discoverers free samples, provide literature, and send “advisers” to talk with the discoverers, and you’ll be right back where you started.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  Is it a consideration with monetary value? Then it’s advertising, much like how bribing public official is still (theoretically) illegal even if you don’t do it in cash. If it’s not, then the discoverer has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand.
  - massysett 2y ago
    I’m not understanding why this is a good standard: right now, anyone who sees a billboard or a TV ad has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand, yet you want to ban those. So you think it would be OK to advertise to discoverers, but not to final purchasers.
    - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
      In the billboard case, the consideration is not between the viewer and the advertiser, it’s between the advertiser and the landowner.
    - georgelyon 2y ago
      For the record, I’m not saying this is the perfect model and we should move to it immediately. My only claim is that it isn’t crazy. I think the fundamental difference between advertising to discoverers vs advertising to consumers is that currently “discoverers” (platforms, content creators, billboard owners, etc.) make money directly from advertisers. Success as a “discoverer” is at least somewhat correlated to income (with more money, platforms can be more successful; content creators can create more compelling content; landowners can buy more billboards). If that money is coming from advertisers, you are biasing the market to prefer discoverers that can secure the most advertiser funding, which in turn preferences advertisers that can spend the most on advertising. This isn’t fundamentally bad, since a compelling product can make a lot of money that can then be spend on advertising, but it also creates anti-consumer incentives (like marketing something that is just good enough not to return as the next best thing). On the other hand, if discoverers are paid directly by consumers, that biases the market to prefer discoverers who identify products that bring the most value to consumers for their money.

kiicia 2y ago

Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.

dehrmann 2y ago
> If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you... It doesn't actually work like that. A/B tests learn the highest-yielding ad. Psychology isn't robust enough to actually predict these things.

petra 2y ago

For discovery of niche products,The Google search ads(without spying) system is a great solution. The issues of monopoly should be handled of course. And regarding word of mouth: Is word of mouth for great products really random?