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I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their use

by _jab 9mo ago

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

iammjm 9mo ago
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.
- spencerflem 9mo ago
  And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc. We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
  - ksaj 9mo ago
    The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products. Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >Why YT and Google in general would want They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads. Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.
    - immibis 9mo ago
      They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.
- al_borland 9mo ago
  As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple. There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example. The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.
    - kyralis 9mo ago
      Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with. Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised. If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
      - master-lincoln 9mo ago
        There are still tests and reviews and content where people can show products without being paid by the people producing these products.
        tpmoney 9mo ago
        Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to reviewers because that gets the product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.
- charlieyu1 9mo ago
  As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed
  - ksaj 9mo ago
    Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees. Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
  - barbazoo 9mo ago
    Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another? I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >Is there not always some sort "marketplace" How exactly does that work for virtual products?
      - cramsession 9mo ago
        If they provide value, people will seek them out.
        taffer 9mo ago
        How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.
        tcfhgj 9mo ago
        Just one counter example: gh.de
- iso1631 9mo ago
  Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers. Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products. But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky. Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
- serial_dev 9mo ago
  Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products. Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.
- thenewnewguy 9mo ago
  Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works. Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but - TV was twice the cost - Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription - All news was paywalled - Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist - etc etc
  - kelnos 9mo ago
    Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end. At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
    - taffer 9mo ago
      Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
  - elevatortrim 9mo ago
    I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening. When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
    - taffer 9mo ago
      > When we used to pay for newspapers Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.
- citizenpaul 9mo ago
  >The world would definitely be better without ads. I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads. Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
  - elevatortrim 9mo ago
    Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - citizenpaul 9mo ago
      Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?
  - citizenpaul 9mo ago
    The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....
- tirant 9mo ago
  Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech. However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
  - moffkalast 9mo ago
    If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.
    - tirant 9mo ago
      That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium. You guys did not read past the first sentence?
  - elevatortrim 9mo ago
    Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.
  - tcfhgj 9mo ago
    ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech
- kibwen 9mo ago
  Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.
    - kibwen 9mo ago
      People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
      - tpmoney 9mo ago
        When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's. Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it. [1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victorian-advertisements/ https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...
- hoorayimhelping 9mo ago
  >All ads are poisonous This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
  - elevatortrim 9mo ago
    Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.
- tzs 9mo ago
  How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
  - iceflinger 9mo ago
    If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?
    - tzs 9mo ago
      Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category. I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.
      - tcfhgj 9mo ago
        just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something else?
- shuntress 9mo ago
  The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM. There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins. The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere. edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
- presentation 9mo ago
  Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
- catlifeonmars 9mo ago
  > All ads are poisonous. Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you. Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
- Blikkentrekker 9mo ago
  Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way. Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
arethuza 9mo ago
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month. I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
- jaapz 9mo ago
  YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.
  - 999900000999 9mo ago
    It's a decent deal. Comes with YouTube Music for 15$. I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on. Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them. Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$. If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
  - mmmlinux 9mo ago
    Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The creators can choose where ads go in their videos.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.
- 9mo ago
ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself. Fix that and then I'll pay. Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
  - driverdan 9mo ago
    YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Sponsorblock exists as well.
      - driverdan 9mo ago
        Sponsorblock is great but only works in the browser. Most people view YT on other devices.
        Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        Revanced Youtube's app support sponsorblock as well.
        wolvoleo 9mo ago
        Yes and Tubular and SmartTubeNext (Android TV!) and Grayjay too. Many options Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to be forked.
master-lincoln 9mo ago
I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers. Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted. It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society. The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
- vladms 9mo ago
  While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits. The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap. I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem". I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy. My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
  - oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
    That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge. So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous? Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner? Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone? To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed. Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives. There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya. If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.
mock-possum 9mo ago
It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.
simplicio 9mo ago
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
- anthem2025 9mo ago
  [dead]
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
  - RHSeeger 9mo ago
    But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.
      - RHSeeger 9mo ago
        How would that work? The email address generally has the ISP's domain name in it.
        layer8 9mo ago
        Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.
matthewsinclair 9mo ago
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about. [0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-advertising https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
- croemer 9mo ago
  You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >what's an ad is much harder. Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.” But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed. Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place… Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
- whs 9mo ago
  In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision). This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign. Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
al_borland 9mo ago
I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
- pyth0 9mo ago
  Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean stuff like "shorts"?
  - layer8 9mo ago
    The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users better control.
  - al_borland 9mo ago
    Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now. The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too. The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts. Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV. It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam. The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations. I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are. I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.
squigz 9mo ago
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society. There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy. [1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
- thfuran 9mo ago
  I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives. I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
  - strogonoff 9mo ago
    Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.
sensanaty 9mo ago
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it. For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash. I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
bko 9mo ago
Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise. If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
- titzer 9mo ago
  > If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
  - vel0city 9mo ago
    I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced. Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-advertising-has-deep-long-lasting-costs-to-brands/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve... However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it. That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.
    - 9mo ago
TechSquidTV 9mo ago
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.
- octoberfranklin 9mo ago
  Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid distracting knee-jerks)... Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?
  - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
    All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs. Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".
  - tcfhgj 9mo ago
    ads
    - octoberfranklin 9mo ago
      Yes. And AML/KYC. Advertisements don't bear the burden of AML/KYC, but micropayments do. AML/KYC costs money, enough to make truly micro micropayments impossible.
maxglute 9mo ago
I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.
keybored 9mo ago
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads. > Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes. Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
carlosjobim 9mo ago
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason. For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
- redeuxx 9mo ago
  I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.
Zigurd 9mo ago
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
amelius 9mo ago
> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time. Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!
jonplackett 9mo ago
Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV5Mmhneg== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...
kelnos 9mo ago
No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal. And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
Babkock 9mo ago
Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.
socalgal2 9mo ago
It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"
- SchemaLoad 9mo ago
  Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.
elevatortrim 9mo ago
Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things: - Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads. - Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.
JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence. Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
- tossaway0 9mo ago
  I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick? You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > would a ban on selling ad space do the trick? How would you define ad space? > You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.) If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
    - tossaway0 9mo ago
      Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space. Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc. Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
fsflover 9mo ago
> whether the world would be better without ads What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org) 1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
nielsbot 9mo ago
> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
- testing22321 9mo ago
  Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time
  - sjw987 9mo ago
    It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life. My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.
mvdtnz 9mo ago
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.
- tcfhgj 9mo ago
  people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as zero-sum ad spending is gone
throwawayk7h 9mo ago
Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.
adrr 9mo ago
People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free. What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats. Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
- globular-toast 9mo ago
  Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful things.
- jiri 9mo ago
  I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot. Still I have to watch such ads. I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
  - dmix 9mo ago
    That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube. Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.
gherkinnn 9mo ago
As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.
- aembleton 9mo ago
  I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.
  - sjw987 9mo ago
    It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that. It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques. A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.
meonkeys 9mo ago
How about a world without money?
dyauspitr 9mo ago
New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.
BiteCode_dev 9mo ago
It would be much, much better: - Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again. - Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore. - Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die. - Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc. - Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster". - Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now. - Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola. - Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore. - Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement. - Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up. - Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard. - No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well. - Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically. - People get back some part of their attention span. The benefits are not superficial; they are immense! Ads are a plague on our societies. Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them. I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
goodpoint 9mo ago
Of course it would be better.
fraboniface 9mo ago
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta. And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
- dmix 9mo ago
  People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
  - tcfhgj 9mo ago
    or micro payments or something different which will work better.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

by _jab 9mo ago

iammjm 9mo ago

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

spencerflem 9mo ago
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc. We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
- ksaj 9mo ago
  The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products. Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >Why YT and Google in general would want They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads. Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.
  - immibis 9mo ago
    They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.
al_borland 9mo ago
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple. There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example. The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.
  - kyralis 9mo ago
    Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with. Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised. If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
    - master-lincoln 9mo ago
      There are still tests and reviews and content where people can show products without being paid by the people producing these products.
      - tpmoney 9mo ago
        Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to reviewers because that gets the product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.
charlieyu1 9mo ago
As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed
- ksaj 9mo ago
  Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees. Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
- barbazoo 9mo ago
  Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another? I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >Is there not always some sort "marketplace" How exactly does that work for virtual products?
    - cramsession 9mo ago
      If they provide value, people will seek them out.
      - taffer 9mo ago
        How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.
        tcfhgj 9mo ago
        Just one counter example: gh.de
iso1631 9mo ago
Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers. Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products. But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky. Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
serial_dev 9mo ago
Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products. Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.
thenewnewguy 9mo ago
Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works. Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but - TV was twice the cost - Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription - All news was paywalled - Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist - etc etc
- kelnos 9mo ago
  Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end. At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
  - taffer 9mo ago
    Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
- elevatortrim 9mo ago
  I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening. When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
  - taffer 9mo ago
    > When we used to pay for newspapers Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.
citizenpaul 9mo ago
>The world would definitely be better without ads. I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads. Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
- elevatortrim 9mo ago
  Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - citizenpaul 9mo ago
    Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?
- citizenpaul 9mo ago
  The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....
tirant 9mo ago
Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech. However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
- moffkalast 9mo ago
  If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.
  - tirant 9mo ago
    That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium. You guys did not read past the first sentence?
- elevatortrim 9mo ago
  Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.
- tcfhgj 9mo ago
  ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech
kibwen 9mo ago
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.
  - kibwen 9mo ago
    People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
    - tpmoney 9mo ago
      When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's. Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it. [1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victorian-advertisements/ https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...
hoorayimhelping 9mo ago
>All ads are poisonous This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
- elevatortrim 9mo ago
  Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.
tzs 9mo ago
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
- iceflinger 9mo ago
  If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?
  - tzs 9mo ago
    Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category. I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.
    - tcfhgj 9mo ago
      just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something else?
shuntress 9mo ago
The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM. There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins. The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere. edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
presentation 9mo ago
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
catlifeonmars 9mo ago
> All ads are poisonous. Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you. Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
Blikkentrekker 9mo ago
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way. Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.

arethuza 9mo ago

I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month. I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!

jaapz 9mo ago
YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.
- 999900000999 9mo ago
  It's a decent deal. Comes with YouTube Music for 15$. I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on. Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them. Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$. If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
- mmmlinux 9mo ago
  Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The creators can choose where ads go in their videos.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.
9mo ago

ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago

People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.

wolvoleo 9mo ago
No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself. Fix that and then I'll pay. Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
- driverdan 9mo ago
  YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Sponsorblock exists as well.
    - driverdan 9mo ago
      Sponsorblock is great but only works in the browser. Most people view YT on other devices.
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        Revanced Youtube's app support sponsorblock as well.
        wolvoleo 9mo ago
        Yes and Tubular and SmartTubeNext (Android TV!) and Grayjay too. Many options Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to be forked.

master-lincoln 9mo ago

I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers. Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted. It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society. The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.

vladms 9mo ago
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits. The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap. I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem". I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy. My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
- oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge. So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous? Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner? Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone? To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed. Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives. There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya. If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.

mock-possum 9mo ago

It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.

simplicio 9mo ago

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

anthem2025 9mo ago
[dead]
somenameforme 9mo ago
Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.
- RHSeeger 9mo ago
  But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.
    - RHSeeger 9mo ago
      How would that work? The email address generally has the ISP's domain name in it.
      - layer8 9mo ago
        Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.

matthewsinclair 9mo ago

I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about. [0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-advertising https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...

croemer 9mo ago
You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >what's an ad is much harder. Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.
bee_rider 9mo ago
He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.” But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed. Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place… Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
whs 9mo ago
In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision). This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign. Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.

al_borland 9mo ago

I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.

pyth0 9mo ago
Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean stuff like "shorts"?
- layer8 9mo ago
  The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users better control.
- al_borland 9mo ago
  Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now. The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too. The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts. Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV. It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam. The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations. I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are. I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.

squigz 9mo ago

The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.

somenameforme 9mo ago
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society. There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy. [1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
thfuran 9mo ago
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives. I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
- strogonoff 9mo ago
  Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.

sensanaty 9mo ago

I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it. For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash. I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?

bko 9mo ago

Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise. If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name

titzer 9mo ago
> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
- vel0city 9mo ago
  I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced. Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-advertising-has-deep-long-lasting-costs-to-brands/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve... However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it. That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.
  - 9mo ago

TechSquidTV 9mo ago

When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.

octoberfranklin 9mo ago
Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid distracting knee-jerks)... Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago
  All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs. Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".
- tcfhgj 9mo ago
  ads
  - octoberfranklin 9mo ago
    Yes. And AML/KYC. Advertisements don't bear the burden of AML/KYC, but micropayments do. AML/KYC costs money, enough to make truly micro micropayments impossible.

maxglute 9mo ago

I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.

keybored 9mo ago

Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads. > Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes. Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?

carlosjobim 9mo ago

There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason. For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.

redeuxx 9mo ago
I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.

Zigurd 9mo ago

When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,

amelius 9mo ago

> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time. Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!

jonplackett 9mo ago

Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV5Mmhneg== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...

kelnos 9mo ago

No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal. And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.

Babkock 9mo ago

Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.

socalgal2 9mo ago

It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"

SchemaLoad 9mo ago
Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.

elevatortrim 9mo ago

Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things: - Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads. - Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago

> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence. Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.

tossaway0 9mo ago
I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick? You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > would a ban on selling ad space do the trick? How would you define ad space? > You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.) If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
  - tossaway0 9mo ago
    Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space. Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc. Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

fsflover 9mo ago

> whether the world would be better without ads What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org) 1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

nielsbot 9mo ago

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

testing22321 9mo ago
Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time
- sjw987 9mo ago
  It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life. My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.

mvdtnz 9mo ago

My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.

tcfhgj 9mo ago
people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as zero-sum ad spending is gone

throwawayk7h 9mo ago

Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.

adrr 9mo ago

People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free. What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.

johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats. Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
globular-toast 9mo ago
Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful things.
jiri 9mo ago
I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot. Still I have to watch such ads. I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
- dmix 9mo ago
  That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube. Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.

gherkinnn 9mo ago

As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.

aembleton 9mo ago
I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.
- sjw987 9mo ago
  It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that. It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques. A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.

meonkeys 9mo ago

How about a world without money?

dyauspitr 9mo ago

New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.

BiteCode_dev 9mo ago

It would be much, much better: - Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again. - Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore. - Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die. - Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc. - Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster". - Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now. - Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola. - Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore. - Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement. - Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up. - Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard. - No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well. - Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically. - People get back some part of their attention span. The benefits are not superficial; they are immense! Ads are a plague on our societies. Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them. I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.

goodpoint 9mo ago

Of course it would be better.

fraboniface 9mo ago

You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta. And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.

dmix 9mo ago
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
- tcfhgj 9mo ago
  or micro payments or something different which will work better.

deleted 9mo ago

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