14 ms·

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial d

• thfuran 8mo ago
  Not just the internet. Ban third-party advertising everywhere.
• thesmtsolver2 8mo ago
  How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
  • admadguy 8mo ago
    Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
  • Funes- 8mo ago
    "Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
    • nickff 8mo ago
      Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
      • coldtea 8mo ago
        Commercial speech is not the same as advertising. The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
        • nickff 8mo ago
          I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
    • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      I'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers.
      • mrob 8mo ago
        Searchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed.
        • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
          That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.
          • mrob 8mo ago
            It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
            • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
              How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people? Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
              • mrob 8mo ago
                People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands. The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
    • BurningFrog 8mo ago
      You make your feelings clear, but don't give any arguments for it. That won't convince anyone.
    • phyzix5761 8mo ago
      99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet. If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
      • NeutralCrane 8mo ago
        99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.
        • phyzix5761 8mo ago
          I know people who do moderation for the advertising side of social platforms and they say that more than half of the advertising submissions are done by small businesses. They said that the estimate is around 90% of small businesses use internet advertising in some capacity. There's a bidding mechanism, though, so more big business ads may be shown; especially if you live in a populated region. But that's just a numbers game.
  • WinstonSmith84 8mo ago
    I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
  • layer8 8mo ago
    It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.
    • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
      • layer8 8mo ago
        There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.
        • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
          The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
          • coldtea 8mo ago
            What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions. In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended. We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
  • Xelbair 8mo ago
    True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily. but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking. Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
    • MBCook 8mo ago
      Magazines made it work for decades. Websites can too. If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
      • andwur 8mo ago
        It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now. Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
  • Barrin92 8mo ago
    >How will you ban that without infringing on free speech You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
    • TMWNN 8mo ago
      >Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
  • BrenBarn 8mo ago
    I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
    • whackernews 8mo ago
      Which parts specifically?
      • BrenBarn 8mo ago
        Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors. At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
        • bigstrat2003 8mo ago
          I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it? The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
  • whackernews 8mo ago
    What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
  • mrob 8mo ago
    You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
    • initramfs2 8mo ago
      That's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash
      • mrob 8mo ago
        Loopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed.
        • MBCook 8mo ago
          This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do. If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole. So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned. It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
      • coldtea 8mo ago
        That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
    • mqus 8mo ago
      Ok, then I don't pay you for advertising. On an entirely unrelated note, could I buy a spot on your website(e.g. at the top) to put a piece of my own website on it? You have a news website, right? And I also have some news to share.
      • 8mo ago
  • skissane 8mo ago
    Free speech is a thing in the EU too. To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it. The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions. The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
    • nickff 8mo ago
      https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression#whatthelawsays https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right... > "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
      • 8mo ago
  • coldtea 8mo ago
    Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people. Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
    • terminalshort 8mo ago
      A restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution.
• iamacyborg 8mo ago
  They already effectively banned the mechanism behind most online advertising with the GDPR, it’s just been really, really poorly enforced.
  • biztos 8mo ago
    So much so that one wonders whether that was the point. Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
• yallpendantools 8mo ago
  Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data. In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still. Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us. My position here is that ads can be fine if they 1. are even somewhat relevant to me. 2. didn't harvest user data to target me. 3. are not annoyingly placed. 4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them. To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments. I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
  • ulbu 8mo ago
    what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”
    • knowriju 8mo ago
      So basically what Google & Amazon does and ban what Meta & Apple does ?
  • MBCook 8mo ago
    I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life. I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me. I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.” Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful. Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t. On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash. I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts. “You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”. Nothing like that is gonna be workable. Such a hard problem.
• almostdeadguy 8mo ago
  Can I get an amen.
• gchamonlive 8mo ago
  Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
  • recursive 8mo ago
    Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.
    • gchamonlive 8mo ago
      How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
      • forgetfreeman 8mo ago
        What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
        • gchamonlive 8mo ago
          But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?
          • recursive 8mo ago
            It used to be.
          • forgetfreeman 8mo ago
            It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.
            • fsflover 8mo ago
• xvector 8mo ago
  Perfect idea, the internet should only be for rich people. After all, who cares about the 50% of the planet that can barely afford a coffee? Or the millions of small businesses that are only able to survive because of targeted ads? Fuck 'em all, because people can't be trusted to use their own devices properly!
  • coldtea 8mo ago
    Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more (not to mention the influece big companies with big spending budgets get). People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
  • mrob 8mo ago
    Plain text with no tracking is cheaper than coffee.
• mrtksn 8mo ago
  Then X will become the only social media as Musk can keep it free unlike any competition and use it to push politics he likes or finds it beneficial for his other companies. In fact, according to reports X is already not making much ad money so it’s already there.
  • tcfhgj 8mo ago
    There's already free ad-free social media, see countless services in the fediverse
    • mrtksn 8mo ago
      Who pays for the costs of those and why?
      • foxygen 8mo ago
        There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
        • mrtksn 8mo ago
          Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
          • foxygen 8mo ago
            Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it. Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
• burnto 8mo ago
  That’s a thought-provoking suggestion. Most services would go out of business, and there would be a cascade of change. I wonder what would remain?
• kaycey2022 8mo ago
  If you want to ban something, then ban free social media. There has to be a minimum charge like 100$ or something a month (keep it tax free for all I care), to access any social media service with more than a 1000 members.
  • kuschku 8mo ago
    Microfiction: Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform. We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative. To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
  • charcircuit 8mo ago
    How does one start a new social media network in that world? Cover the $100 fee, essentially making it free to use? It would kill any competitors from being created, at least until inflation makes $100 worthless.
• matthewsinclair 8mo ago
  I agree [0]. Well, taxed rather than banned. But we’re in the same postcode. [0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-advertising https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
• qsera 8mo ago
  Banning ads is not possible. But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.
  • foxygen 8mo ago
    Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.
• allan_s 8mo ago
  Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" . I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
  • SecretDreams 8mo ago
    Nah, advertisement in general. Just make the internet a paid sub. We don't need influencers or snake oil ads. And without ads and influencers, there is no reason for meta to try to keep people infinitely stuck to their phones. They can get their cut just from a paid sub.
    • ashdksnndck 8mo ago
      Netflix (even before they introduced ads) optimized for watch time. Higher watch time = higher retention for subscriptions (even when prices go up).
    • jama211 8mo ago
      Are we wishcasting here or suggesting realistic policy?
    • ThunderSizzle 8mo ago
      Every website would then become a snake oil salesman for buying their subscription. It'd be like streaming today. Fragmented, expensive, and useless. And no one would like it. Beyond that, websites would still need people to be addicted to justify the sub. And furthermore, "sponsorships" will still occur behind the sub wall.
      • SecretDreams 8mo ago
        What was the internet like in the early days before monetization? (Hint: I was there and it was great, albeit slow on dial up =]).
• normie3000 8mo ago
  How would you ban advertising? Would astroturfing be banned? Would LLM-assisted astroturfing be banned? Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
• dehrmann 8mo ago
  Maybe this would be the nudge people need, but there are a handful of well-researched, reputable newspapers out there that you can subscribe to and support quality journalism. For the most part, people don't. They'd rather have entertainment news for free with ads than quality journalism they pay for.
• fooker 8mo ago
  What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial? If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise. In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway. I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
  • AmbroseBierce 8mo ago
    What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
    • fooker 8mo ago
      You'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally. Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
  • phire 8mo ago
    I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising. Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content. Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
    • fooker 8mo ago
      Good policy in my opinion.
    • raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      Yes, a user in GA should be shown an ad for a car dealership in Hawaii…
      • 8mo ago
• noosphr 8mo ago
  There has never been a mass information medium to survive on subscriptions. This includes everything since news papers in the 18th century.
  • samrus 8mo ago
    I think modern social media sites dump too much useless information on users. We can do with less
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
• phyzix5761 8mo ago
  If these companies fail because their quality isn't good enough to support paid subscribers isn't that effectively the same thing as people choosing to not use their platform? Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version? Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
• nine_k 8mo ago
  I think this would have an opposite effect. An addicted customer is a customer willing to pay. Think about gambling or tobacco. BTW OnlyFans somehow lives off subscriptions. OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
  • LaundroMat 8mo ago
    Because you want to support the platform or because you don't want to see ads?
• derektank 8mo ago
  You don’t even have to move towards a full ban. Instead, simply tax companies that offer ads in proportion to how long users spend on their site. This will naturally encourage websites to get users in, experience whatever content it is that they’re offering ads against, and then GTFO.
• bruce511 8mo ago
  Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do. For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant? If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites? If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising? I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube... Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement? Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions. And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
  • stingraycharles 8mo ago
    Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company. It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising. Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not. Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not. It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.
    • nozzlegear 8mo ago
      How would something like Github Sponsors work? Lots of projects use a "sponsor us for $LARGE_SUM and we'll mention you in our readme and release notes" model.
      • 1718627440 8mo ago
        Maybe advertising should be banned in stuff that you are not the author for. Google putting ads into their blog posts is fine, Google putting ads into the search result is not. So on a Github project, the maintainer can put adds, Github can not unless it's their project.
• raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  So for the people who couldn’t afford it? Let them eat cake? Are you going to put up a “Great Firewall of America” to keep non US sites advertising sites from being seen by US citizens? Are you going to stop podcasts from advertising?
• alsetmusic 8mo ago
  I agree with you. Advertising corrupts companies. It’s also annoying and I hate it. I don’t know how we’d ban advertising without impinging on free speech laws in the USA, where a lot of huge companies reside. How would you do it?
• Aloha 8mo ago
  I have said for years - Micropayents, something like the traffic settlement system for termination charges in the NANPA PSTN, and when I say micropayments I mean 1000ths of a cent. Then the content that does cost money (news, social media, whatever can be monetized and the users are paying for consumption.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• jama211 8mo ago
  lol good luck with that
• virgildotcodes 8mo ago
  I’ll probably be crucified for this but I think the free w/advertising model is not fundamentally evil, and gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have, keeps the rest of us from death by 1,000 monthly subscriptions.
  • AlecSchueler 8mo ago
    > gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have Addiction is a precursor to poverty. If we accept the domino theory of "online advertising -> addictive design" then the fundamental evil becomes clear. Holding people in poverty in order to profit from their time and attention.
    • mschild 8mo ago
      But the most valuable ad targets are people with money unless my product specifically targets low-income individuals (pay day lenders, etc).
      • AlecSchueler 8mo ago
        I think that's debatable, there's arguments like quantity over quality to be made, but I also think it's somewhat beside the point of "ad supported services are a favour to the poor."
      • saalweachter 8mo ago
        Which is why a lot of things are moving to "pay w/ ads". Not only do you get paid twice, your ad space is more valuable because you've weeded out the people who can't pay.
      • ndriscoll 8mo ago
        Most of the people I know with money are difficult to convince to spend it. e.g. rich people don't buy designer bags; poor people do. My wife makes all of our food; we do delivery or go out to eat maybe once every year or two. We have no recurring subscriptions (other than utilities). Our phone bill is $20 for both of us. etc. We also live in an area where outdoor ads are banned (which tends to be the case in wealthy areas IME), and I block ads on our computers, so we rarely encounter them. Consumerism is gauche.
• rsolva 8mo ago
  Ban personalized advertising!
  • Terr_ 8mo ago
    Putting on my cynic-hat: 1. Reform occurs, now ad-networks serve ads based on the content it appears near, rather than analyzing the viewer. 2. Ad-network says "You know, I'd pay more if you had a version of this content that drew people who were X, Y, Z..." 3. The sites start duplicating their content into hundreds of inconsequentially-different sub-versions, profiling visitors to guide them to "what fits your interests", but it's actually a secret signal to the ad-networks. 4. Ad-network, super-coincidentally, releases tools that can "help" sites do it.
• hirenj 8mo ago
  Even better, don’t ban it, but require companies to do age verification (above a certain age?) before displaying advertising. You get two wins in one: make the child market less attractive for algorithmic feeds, and you also can get a better product (no algorithmic feeds) without ads if you don’t age verify. Win-win situation!
• samrus 8mo ago
  Positively luddian proposal. I kinda like it
• fsflover 8mo ago
  > banning advertising on the Internet This. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
• thaumasiotes 8mo ago
  > They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it". You know, we used to have Flash games that were free to play and ad supported. With the iPhone, those died, and now we have mobile games that support themselves with microtransactions. The method of collecting fees on the games was to lower their quality, not to raise it.
• amelius 8mo ago
  Yes, and advertising drives mass overconsumption. So banning it will solve problems in that area too.
• gloosx 8mo ago
  This is a brilliant idea, really, but unfotunately it is not a fit for the society we have constructed so far. There are little to no governments around which would willingly hit the brakes on Consumerism — it is having a hypnotic effect on the people they herd as well as being very profitable for them
  • permo-w 8mo ago
    And it's part owner of the forces keeping fundamentalist religion under wraps too. Why fight over god when you can fight over your football team or your games console or your phone brand or your car
• permo-w 8mo ago
  The major loss would be Youtube. Youtube is possibly the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen. Yeah there's some bad stuff, but you want to know how to do almost anything from tying your shoelaces to building a mega laser first-hand from an expert, and watch it be done? It's on Youtube, for free. Remove advertising and it dies and all of that goes with it. Even if the EU, say, buy it off Google and take it into public ownership, which the US government very probably wouldn't allow and also isn't really part of the EU's philosophy, you're still going to have to continuously pay creators for their work and hosting costs, forever. Otherwise I think it's a great idea. Maybe just carve out an exception for educational content
• cyanydeez 8mo ago
  Wpuldnt it be better just to create a .noad ICANN domain and let see if that gets any traction?
• mmonaghan 8mo ago
  I don't think this changes the dynamic one bit. Every subscription product still optimizes for engagement. Then there's the free speech aspect - sure it's easy to say "we don't want to see cigarette ads"- what about your local mom n pop restaurant buying ads to try and get more people to eat in? The primordial domino tile is human nature, which you're not going to knock over. The solution is probably closer to what China does - punish companies that don't prioritize/train algos to prioritize the values we hold dear. Basically, just keep beating meta and bytedance until they decide to get their timelines out of the politics game and into the education game, for example, or the democracy game, or whatever your country's main issues are. I think there's definitely room to regulate "divisiveness" though, and that's a little clearer than "addictive design".
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
  Thankfully that absurd comment about "vibes" dropped from the top spot "It's the primordial domino tile." FWIW, I believe this is correct However when using the term "banning" this needs to be placed in context; advertising might be "banned" only in certain circumstances.. Mind you, advertising has been banned whole cloth from computer networks in the past. It is still banned on many computer networks.^1 Before the internet (an interconnected network of computer networks) opened to the public there was a rule, i.e., policy, against advertising A better term than "banning" might be simply "regulating". Online advertising is not regulated in the same way that advertising is regulated on billboards, in print publications, radio or television. For example, regulating the time (electoral campaigns), place (billboards), subject matter (cigarettes) Whenever this topic comes up on HN, it draws inane replies about people being unable to distinguish advertising from anything else But there is zero evidence to support this theory in practice. Everyone knows what advertising is, and how to identify it. That's why and how people are capable of complaining about it Even this forum, Hacker News, places limits on advertising. YC may promote its participating companies but others are generally not permitted to advertise. Submissions that are deemed to be ads are killed. If advertising was undefinable, then how is HN able to define it If advertising was impossible to define then how could anyone design a so-called "ad blocker" 1. If advertising were undefinable then why would any computer network have a "Network Use Policy" that prohibited using the network for disseminting advertising The suggestion that advertising is undefinable, that either everything is advertising or nothing is advertising, is pure nonsense It's only when the subject of tampering with the sole "business model" of the so-called "tech" company having nothing else to sell, or the means of substinence for the low quality website operator republishing public information in pages crammed full of ads and tracking, that HN commenters try to argue that advertising is beyond definition A large percentage of internet users, perhaps a majority, have never experienced the internet without ads. Hence it may be difficult for these people to understand the place of advertising on a computer network. Let's be clear, originally, there was _no place for it_ Some people alive today did experience the internet without ads. Sadly, many of them are now engaged in providing internet advertising services for financial gain. Others are not. I'm in the later category Some of the loudest voices defending internet advertising will be people in the former category. They have cashed in at every internet user's expense
• jaredklewis 8mo ago
  I’m sympathetic, but I think this idea seems pretty clearly a political non-starter. “Good news voters! You now have to pay for your email, search engines, and social media accounts.” Privacy and healthy digital habits are issues dear to my heart and issues that I think are gaining some modest traction, but they just can’t compete with a core pocketbook issues like making everything cost more. In the US, we just elected a guy that campaigned on, among other things, ending democracy, because (at least according to some political pundits) egg prices went up under Biden. “But you pay that cost now, it’s just hidden!” I know, I know. But that doesn’t strike me as a politically winning argument. It’s like trying to explain to people that inflation is ok as long as if in adjusted terms wages outpace it; technically correct, but a political loser. I would be happy to be wrong of course.