- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
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I was on a car from ride sharing app recently, and there was a tablet in front of me playing ads continuously for the whole ride. Asked the driver to turn it off and he said, “I have to keep it on”. I know it’s not the requirement from the app, so honestly how dystopian is it?
The way things are going people can’t afford anything and will have ads blasting in front of them for discounts.
this happened to me once and I gave them 1 star for forcing me to watch ads
I wouldve left an awful review, 1 star, no tip. Thats such shit to do. Fuck that guy.
Yeah. I didn’t want to do immediately after the trip. But now I don’t see the option to do it from the history of trips.
Lol, almost no one tips as is right now.
Oh please yes
Put a 100% stop to advertising but also marketing altogether.
I’ve found many wonderful products through advertising that I never would have otherwise. So many small businesses would have to be able to show off their products to new customers somehow.
It’s easy enough* to restrict advertising, there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
*we’ve done it before, we can do it again, and if we aren’t smart enough to figure it out then we deserve this bullshit honestly.
If you don’t mind answering, what kind of advertising have you found products you now enjoy through?
Not at all. I find a fair amount through Kickstarter campaigns, like the Yarro Studios Dice-o-matic, and the mandolin Youtube channel I follow will obviously self-promote their Patreon which has all kinds of great content. A lot of product reviews done by stores would be likely counted as advertisements, too. I’ve found good music through Instagram ads for it and I don’t even listen to Negative25 but their ad videos are really funny skits all on their own.
The thing is that we tend to like to know about things that we will enjoy and we don’t mind watching good ads. Bad ads, ads that are lying or dancing around the truth, and especially ads for things we don’t care about(which is everything if it interrupts a tense moment in a show) are all what we really don’t want to see.
Okay so Lemmy, Jerboa, Phone, ISP all were found via advertising. So if I am enjoying this conversation, every facit of it came to my notice via advertising. Word out mouth and online discussions are advertising
Word of mouth and discussions are not the kind of advertising being discussed in the article.
That would make more sense, maybe the title saying making all advertising illegal is inaccurate then.
How do you propose new businesses will work? Genuinely looking for discussion.
There used to be a business catalog book called “yellow pages”. Now there are map applications, price comparison sites, customer review sites, and keyword search engines. All of those make advertisements unnecessary.
By growing.
How do they grow if they can’t tell anyone about their products or services?
By telling them, who said you cant? Communication and advertisement are two different things.
Its crazy that by no advertisement you immediately jumped to you cant tell anyone about anything
By telling them, who said you cant?
By telling who? And How?
Communication isnt advertisement. Depends on the type of business dude. Theres a thing called word of mouth.
And how do you do that en-masse? How do you spread the word to people by word of mouth who haven’t heard of your product/service?
My local bakery doesn’t have that issue
They just make great bread so people go there by the hundreds
Open source software doesn’t have that problem, I found everything I love
Once I need a product I can go to a forum or chat group and find reviews
Your local bakery can rely on local customers who likely walk right by it. They produce inexpensive products that are relatively easy and quick to produce.
Not every business is like that. Maybe they spent a lot of money upfront on research and development and need to shift x units by a certain time to make it work financially? How could they do that if they have no physical presence on the high street and without telling people at scale that they exist?
Open source software is generally free, written by volunteers. There isn’t the financial pressure to sell and recover costs by a certain time.
Perhaps there is a difference in listing a service in some sort of index, like the phone book, versus techniques intended to develop a need (or want) where there wasn’t one otherwise, like an iPod commercial.
I’m not the person you were replying to and I also don’t have a good answer to the question, but man, the giddiness I feel at the idea of yeeting every single sales department on the planet directly into the stratosphere… Pure euphoria.
However that would work, i dont care. Open source software has next to no marketing and I’ve found it all through chat groups, etc.
I’ve found my local super market and bakery simply by walking by
I buy toothpaste by trying a few and sticking by one I like
I never watch commercials, I don’t do advertising or marketing, and I’m missing out on nothing
The lines get really blurry.
Manufacturers pay grocery stores shelving fees, both to be stocked in that store at all and for specific locations (eye level shelving is prime real estate). That the toothpaste is on the shelf there at all for you to see it and decide to try it… is basically due to a paid advertisement.
Bakeries often put signs about openings or events at the end of the block. Do you think that should be banned, too? What about a billboard in their own parking lot?
You’rr under arrest for advertising open source software lol. It’s illegal to discuss products as promotion is advertising.
Seems to me it’s an efficiency problem.
If you want to send an email to someone, you don’t send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn’t useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it’s typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.
People out there who want that product need to know what’s on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn’t be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it’s so open to abuse, it’s a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.
More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don’t, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.
Guys, you wouldn’t find anything good if it wasn’t for good marketing you all got the attention span of a gold fish.
That’s not how it worked before advertising was even a thing. People still found good services and the better services got better word of mouth, all for free.
If only. Wouldn’t that be something?
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
The privacy thing isn’t necessarily part of advertising though.
Advertising can be as complex as targeted algorithms built using harvested information and even AI bullshit, or as simple as a sign by the road saying “next right for MegaBurger” or even a small box with “Bob’s autoglass repair” in the paper.
It’s the volume and invasiveness that’s a problem. Ads in your mailbox, ads in your inbox, ads on your streaming service and when you turn on your Roku etc etc acting as blockers to the content you’re actually looking for.
I’m totally cool too go back to having an “autoglass” or “plumbers” section in paper and online yellow Pages etc, which target people actually looking for a service. I’m also cool with places which I subscribe to advertising me deals I might like (not so much signing me up for their shit the first time I buy from them), but the shoving crap in people’s face and information harvesting that needs to end.
Hell, I even have a collection of saved ads that were clever and entertaining I’d share with people, yet most companies go for volume (both audible and amount) over substance
Also roadside advertisements for services are also acceptable, what I mean is something like Peggy Sues dinner where they’ve got some signs to let you know which off ramp to take. Frankly speaking allowing gas stations and food places to advertise off the side of the highway is pretty reasonable to me, even in the modern era with phones the usefulness of them can very either because you don’t want to look at it while driving or it’s just got no signal.
The web has been cleaned with uBlock Origin. Doing that IRL would be great. And for every stupid counter argument (I’ve seen those on HackerNews), I don’t tolerate brain washing.
The most stupid argument I’ve seen is from an American who said “what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?” Well, that’s the job of the doctor. Your society has failed if you rely on marketing to eat random chemical dangerous stuff.
In fact the pervasive drug commercials were illegal until the 1990s because why would you target the patient rather than the doctor?
They are still illegal in many countries.
As they should be
When I watch a US sport, I’m blown away that the ads are all medical, banking/insurance, cars, and maybe fast food. It’s so weird.
Don’t forget personal injury or liability lawyers.
And gambling.
What’s a normal selection of sports ads look like elsewhere?
I was going to note it down as I was watching F1 at the time of writing that comment. There was a kids hospital charity, a food charity, a car, other sport, and a travel/tourism ad.
Every time I watch premier league it’s just gambling ads nonstop lol
“what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?”
lol what? No way anyone says that with a straight face
5 minutes ago on Hacker News, among a lot of stupid stuff like “your life is empty without having ads all around you.”
Reference for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596333
I love that in Cyberpunk 2077 they’re is often a channel on called “just ads”. Of course in pure cyberpunk style those ads can be horrific.
There are shopping channels in many countries (or at least paid cable television) which are literally just ads. In classic cyberpunk style, it’s a reflection of the dystopian present.
That’s not an ad, it’s the “Scamming old people by phone” show.
They’re on HN acting like Googling and getting WebMD is uüuber rare
The most stupid argument I’ve seen is from an American who said “what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?” Well, that’s the job of the doctor.
Wow, even if we imagine some different situation where information about a new development, service or creation is needed, that’s what reviews and journalism are supposed to cover, not advertisement. (In b4: the observation that those have tragically been becoming more and more indistinguishable from advertising.)
The most stupid argument I’ve seen is from an American who said “what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?”
If only there was a system of interconnected knowledge bases where new information could be published and indexed for easy lookup… Nah what am I saying, who would have interest in such a thing…
Don’t be silly, no-one knows what a library is these days! They’re all stuck on that internet thing.
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I would like meaningful regulation on advertising. Something to the effect of “STOP BLASTING MY FACE WITH ADS EVERY CHANCE YOU GET YOU SCUMFUCKERS”
There is a gas station nearby who runs non-stop unmutable (there is no mute button) ads. I don’t go to that gas station anymore.
Oh please gods yes. Advertising is violence and even though most of my life is now ad free, I still can’t avoid the advertising scourge being shoved into my eyeballs every time I leave my house. It would be a blessed weight lifted from my already tired brain to never see a single ad again.
“Advertising is violence???”
Anyone who says these kind of statements should be forced to watch an hour of gore.
Nobody who isn’t knee deep in circle jerking leftist communities thinks you’re clever. You can argue against advertising without trivializing worse things.
“advertising is violence” says so much about how we (the world) allow companies to behave.
There were ads in ancient Rome, just to show how deep the rot goes.
I have existed totally ad free for a few years now. I use a whitelist DNS filter.
Yes yes yes, this!
I always joke w my gf, that when I’m president, I’ll ban marketing. It’s ugly, wasteful, useless (from the consumer’s pov,) annoying, etc. I can’t believe it’s not hyper-regulated and taxed into oblivion.
How…Would you do that?
You do know that that marketing or advertising is far FAR more fundamental right? Yeah, there is a lot of BS these days, for sure.
But the concept of trying to find someone to sell something you made too cannot be banned. Unless you have a solution to the entire concept of “selling” anything, and turn society into one without needs?
It’s 5000 BC and I just made a pot with a lip that pours water easier. I tell someone about this in hopes they might want one too so i can survive on my work <----- that’s advertising.
It’s 2000 BC and I discovered a new spice and am trying to sell it for cooking. I demonstrate how it smells <----- that’s advertising.
…etc Apply this to almost everything anyone has made that they try to sell to someone else. They advertise and market it.
right now, your own post, marketing what you might do as president… Is a form of marketing.
It’s deeply engrained in every single society, and has been for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years. It’s a fundamental concept for humans and humans society.
Would @[email protected] please share your thoughts on the response from @[email protected]?
Of course if these ideas were ever put into practice, they’d require the establishment of definitions, scope, parameters, exceptions, consequences, etc.
I think a lot of us understand the spirit of the OP, and you’re showing us you aren’t on the same page or even opened the book.
Sure, if the offered idea was to abolish every philosophically tangential advertisment, then you’ll be the advertisor of reason when we advertise bans on flowers’ colors because they advertise to pollinators, or bans on babies’ cries because they’re advertising their want of nourishment.
They and possibly op (with their argument that 99.9% ad free) is referring to modern day advertisements that mass manipulates people. A person in 2000 BC telling their spice is better doesn’t compare to our modern advertisement system which targets suggestible people with well placed targeted ads. They also are probably referring to those ads which you constantly see barging into your every day life in the form of billboards, banners etc. If you were to search for a something in Google, most often the front result would be non relevant SEO garbage or AI gibberish promoting something which is not relevant to something you searched. Oh you want to know why you have this BSOD screen and warning, check out this antivirus software sort of bullshit results.
Even though what you said is right, that advertisement has fundamentally existed ever since human moved out of tribal society, the form of advertisement we see now is never before seen and in my opinion which I agree with OP is than we can indeed abolish current form of advertisement and move on without significant impact on normal people. Ofcourse we would still be documenting products and people who want that could still seek out what they want based on their requirement (this might qualify as advertisement since the product won’t be seen without information regarding it, but it’s no way comparable to the form of advertisement you and I mentioned above).
It’s 5000bc… do whatever your community needs, not what’s gonna make you more money
You can and should make the distinction between being paid to advertise something and sharing information based on your believes. There is such a thing as free marketing and I agree you cannot ban that, but you can ban paid advertising in a similar way as paid sex is banned in many places across the world.
I’m now imagining advertising being carried out the same way prostitution is.
“Hey sailor, want some good product recommendations?”
Replace sailor with user and you’re spot on. Instead of selling intimacy we sell our attention in exchange for content.
considering tons of free services are paid for with advertising, a lot of such services would cease to exist/be free.
be it websites such as youtube and streaming sites like twitch, or almost any website for that matter.
someone made a brand of water thats free and is entirely paid by advertising printed on the bottle, that would be gone too.
hell, i hate ads, but considering i use ublock, i havent seen any in years, and in real life you can just not look at them.
I’m sure they would change their business model with some free watching hours to lure you in, and then once they become valuable to you, you have to pay to continue watching. Or something like that.
Let’s ban all persuasive advertising! No reason not to let people make a list of features or something, like a notification, but that’s it.
Word of mouth works for someone with an already established customer base but I can’t even imagine how I could have gotten my business going when I started a year ago without ads. That’s how 99% of my customers found out about me. This is physical flyers though - I don’t do online advertising except for maintaining a some kind of social media presence for my business.
