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> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when

> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product. Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately

pishpash 1y ago
Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.
imiric 1y ago
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers. No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around. The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people. You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise. This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made. I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
- beambot 1y ago
  Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
  - PebblesRox 1y ago
    I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
    - beambot 1y ago
      When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
      - wat10000 1y ago
        The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
    - what 1y ago
      I get various catalogs/flyers/etc interspersed with my physical mail. They just send it to me, I never opted in.
      - aezart 1y ago
        Bulk mail should be banned, yeah.
  - exac 1y ago
    I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
addicted 1y ago
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control. > nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem. Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago
  > People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
irrational 1y ago
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
programjames 1y ago
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.

pishpash 1y ago

Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.

imiric 1y ago

> People who sell things need ways to find buyers. No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around. The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people. You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise. This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made. I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.

beambot 1y ago
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
- PebblesRox 1y ago
  I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
  - beambot 1y ago
    When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
    - wat10000 1y ago
      The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
  - what 1y ago
    I get various catalogs/flyers/etc interspersed with my physical mail. They just send it to me, I never opted in.
    - aezart 1y ago
      Bulk mail should be banned, yeah.
- exac 1y ago
  I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.

addicted 1y ago

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control. > nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem. Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.

YetAnotherNick 1y ago
> People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.

irrational 1y ago

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.

programjames 1y ago

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.