Advertising is a parasitic force on society. It sucks up your attention with a willful intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.
If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
Ironically the companies with the most widespread advertising are the LARGE companies! They pollute our daily lives with stupid ads.
I’m really not concerned about the car I don’t have, the quality of my floor mop, or the latest prescription pharmaceutical that my primary care doctor is too stupid to even spell.
I really feel for the small companies. But outside extremely industry specific mediums, they just can’t afford to advertise much. They have to be known from reputation and search engine results.
So, while I see the point you are trying to make, by volume, the bulk of advertising is utter crap.
I don't really care if companies -- of any size -- can reach me or not. If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
>If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.
For a concrete example:
I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.
Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.
Advertising is the cure worse than the disease in this case. I'm willing to have a slightly worse service occasionally if it means I'm not being bombarded with corporate propaganda. If a service is bad enough, or my desire for something is great enough, I will seek it out.
Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.
To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
If you're relying on ads to tell you how to solve your problems you're implicitly trusting that the information provided in ads is factual and unbiased, and that the problem in question wasn't entirely manufactured by the industry that is now showing you ads (see also: manscaping, engagement rings, vehicle AI integration, etc)
I don't mean to be rude but I genuinely can't think of any service I've learned about through advertising. Do you have an example? I actively seek out product reviews and trailers for things I already know I want but I don't think an ad has changed my mind, just changed whether I buy A or B
Good point. Friends, family, and colleagues keep telling me to buy stupid things they see from online ads all the time. They're probably pushing me towards an equal number of non-stupid things and I just don't notice.
In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
In the old days, if I wanted someone to remove a tree stump in my yard, I would ask my neighbor who had a stump removed who did it for them, or open the yellow pages.
In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.
The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.
I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.
Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.
It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.
Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.
You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.
You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.
> You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.
There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.
When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.
We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.
> You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.
If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.
> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.
The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.
The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.
My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.
.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.
But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?
Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?
Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?
> Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.
I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.
Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.
> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?
The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.
Plenty of people manager to avoid being social outcasts without using Instagram. Keeping up with your friends pictures and reels is hardly a needed part of friendship. Call, text, message your friends, organise to hangout, put their birthdays in your calendar.
You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.
If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?
Imagine this: instead of the search engine space being 90% focused on ads and 10% on providing a good search experience, you could have one that is focused on finding the thing you're looking for.
You can have that now if you subscribe to Kagi but it costs money to operate and use. So without advertising you're choosing to make it impossible for poorer people to search.
I don't see that argument having much heft. The people who are worried about their view being soured by billboards aren't the ones who are worried about what happens to poorer people. They move in different circles.
I really can't believe that someone who frequents Hacker News can ask this question.
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
And, just to expand a bit on this, what i find puzzling about the stance of "how will you find out about stuff without ads" is that it goes totally contrary to my contemporary experience.
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
This a thread about imagining a world without ads. If we're trying to envision that, it surely is not too hard to imagine how such a useful service for society as a search engine could be funded by other means, right?
There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.
People get upset at the idea of using government money to feed the starving. Why do you assume they would be ok with spending billions to create a search engine?
The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.
We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to
For every situation like yours there's probably 10 where a product that doesn't work is advertised and people waste their money and continue suffering. This is not a problem that should be fixed by intrusive data gathering and advertising, but with a working healthcare system.
I did talk to a doctor. He quoted me $12,000 for a surgery that sounded excessive and had a long recovery time. I try to get second opinions, but doctors are so busy that I never get a call back or schedule many months out.
Oddly the wealthier I get the more I distrust doctors. Why perform a $300 tooth filling, example, when you can creatively justify a $5000 root canal and crown. They know I have the money and their kids private school ain't cheap.
Advertising may have been necessary the way you're describing in the 1950's but it's now so much easier to move information around.
As for all communication being a bit like advertising, a significant threshold has been crossed once you're paying to have your information elevated above that of your peers. If we didn't allow that, the noise floor would be lower, and it would be possible to achieve the benefits of advertising without the harms.
For instance, suppose I'm looking for a plumber... there are only maybe fifteen within a reasonable distance. There's no need for the plumbers to pay some third party for the privilege of being first in the list. I can limit my search criteria so that the results are narrow enough that I can consider each one, and they can instead spend that money on pipes or toilets or whatever.
The difference is that we’re reading these comments willingly. A great deal of advertising is imposed on people who don’t want it.
If I don’t want my behavior swayed by HN, I can stop reading it. If I don’t want my behavior swayed by advertising, I can... close my eyes every time a bus goes by, avoid any public place with an operating television, and never check my mail?
Yes? Unfortunately others can communicate to us without our consent. That could be ads or someone writing you a postcard, or yelling on a street corner. All of those can influence us and not all of them are welcome but I don’t think it’s reasonable to think we can live in a world where we can fully control it without becoming hermits.
I’m curious how you’d define advertising. Is it just something applied to another form of media? Would you count an end cap at the super market? Does the McDonald’s logo on the big sign you can see from the highway count? Or the coke machine inside?
Gotta disagree. The most disruptive up and comers seem to get there through word of mouth. I mean look at Figma. I haven't seen a single Figma ad since they began as a company (they probably exist somewhere) but they really rocketed off through word of mouth among the design community. Pretty sure slack was similar in this regard. Both disrupters.
I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
The companies exist to serve me and not the other way around. Companies don't have any inherent right to exist. If they can't make money off of me they're probably not doing anything that matters.
Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.
Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
The difference between an advertisement and a post on HN is that the HN comment (presumably) is not a paid comment - people are saying things on HN because they genuinely believe them, not because someone with an agenda paid them to pretend to believe them!
And that makes all the difference. I am very happy to read that an HN commenter prefers one specific brand of car - assuming that this is an unbiased comment and the commenter was not paid to say that. On the other hand, if they *were* paid to say they like a specific brand of car, they are deceiving me! They are exposing my brain to ideas and associations that are inauthentic, and making me more likely to buy a certain brand of car even though that car cannot get mentioned on its own merits, and instead needs to pay for attention.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that "advertising is how monopolies are broken" - my read on the advertising industry is that larger companies today have a massive advantage over smaller companies, and that smaller businesses would be more able to succeed if advertising was removed. And the advantage more or less comes from the larger brands ability to afford to expose a larger number of people, and that exposure has superlinear effects on purchase behavior (because not only are you exposed to it, but your friends are talking about it, and their family is talking about it, etc).
Some ads are abusive. Some ads compel behavior that is obviously bad for the participants.
Take all the sports gambling ads right now.
Take loot boxes with flashing visuals for children.
Some ads are fine. They are informative and useful, and can provide value.
I'm my opinion, we have leaned too far towards the bad. The useful is being drowned out by ads that take advantage of any social or emotional vulnerability we have. Banking on physical rewards systems geared towards smaller, more meaningful social groups to make us give up attention, time, and money.
I'm in favor of banning ads. Let's try the other end of the spectrum for a bit.
To be crass: let God find his own in the ads world. The good products will still spread organically. It's still advertising. It's just not the bullshit we have today.
There is a balance to be maintained for sure. I am known for bemoaning the almost-exclusively scammy ads on Facebook (and getting downvoted for it here).
But - also - my wife and I opened a restaurant recently. We need exposure. We are buying ad space on social media, having influencers review the place, working on putting up fliers at public bulletin boards, and investigating mailers (snail mail). It's clear, we're not going to make a go of it without connecting with more customers. If it was just me and her working it, we'd be in the green but we have day jobs and pay our (necessary) employees fairly.
They can still promote their products, by sending them to social media reviewers no-strings-attached, or by posting through non-commercial channels. For instance, corporate representatives can promote their company's offerings on their own accounts on twitter or reddit.
What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
There are definitely a lot of problems with advertising and I am all for regulating them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for smaller organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) without some form of advertising people just would not hear about us at all.
If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
You sound like someone who has never had to run an event, concert, protest, market a new product, or build reputation on an existing one. Your solution — rely on influencers who only review — is unscalable across industries, price points, and ultimately eye balls.
I have taken one project to $3 billion and another to $700 million, and along the way we have run numerous events, marketed numerous products, and built many reputations. Many of the most successful products (including one that hit 2 million MAU) didn't use any form of paid promotion at all!
So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.
That’s impressive. Given that experience, how do you expect people to learn of products and events without any paid promotion in a scalable way? Here n=all businesses.
You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.
I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).
Not everything has to scale, and we should be comfortable with some ideas just being bad and us not doing them.
We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.
Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.
"And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape."
Sounds nice in theory.
"You want to like us on facebook and get a perk for free on your app? (No money involved)."
"Hey you maybe want a job? We will give one to those who spread the word most about us"
Devil is in the details. And humans have a lot of details.
Otherwise I am all for starting to ban of advertisement, what is possible.
The law has pretty firm definitions for things like "in kind payments" and "consideration" - because these sorts of sneaky ways of rewarding people are also relevant to bribes!
So we aren't treading into new uncharted territory where the details need to be figured out - humans have been playing this game for centuries and the law already has effective tools for navigating the tricky parts.
And it is not really working well in my perception, when it is standard procedure for politicians to land high paying (useless) jobs in the industry they formerly regulated, after some grace period.
Or get payed a lot for being a public speaker. Where no one cares about the speech.
> convince someone with an audience to feature you without paying them to do it.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
--
While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
> It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.
It’s a ban on advertising, not a ban on marketing budgets. You could still have a Malborough F1 company to make your brand inadvertently visible in F1, and a Malborough Acting company to make actresses smoke in public in defiance to bad males who want to tell them what to do (both are true stories).
If advertising is blocked, the exact same amount of dollars will be spent perverting every public speech.
This sounds like a Utopian idea that in practice would result in a lot of self-dealing and outright fraud on the part of the influencers you’re hypothecating. Hard pass.
All you’ve done here is shifted how the money is spent. The companies with deep pockets will spend extra on getting into that reviewer’s queue. See: lobbying.
I don't think that would be the case. If people want to find an org that is doing what you are doing, they will find you. If they aren't interested in whatever it is you're doing, then they won't hear about you.
And that's exactly the point. I don't want products and services pushed at me. I don't want companies telling me that I need what they offer, even if I've never really thought about it before.
And remember, this is just a ban on paid advertising. This doesn't mean you can't put up a website to market your product. You can sell through Amazon or whatever, and appear in search results (results that aren't affected by anyone paying for ad space or better rankings). You just can't pay others to advertise it for you.
There are a lot of problems with slavery and I am all for it them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for slave owners, without some form of slavery, people would just not pick cotton at all.
Billboards have been banned in Hawaii for a century ie. they were banned even before it became a state. Their are also billboard bans in Alaska, Vermont, and Maine.
To be clear I am 100% fine with billboard bans. I live in a billboard ban state and it's great. I was talking about the proposed complete ban of all advertising of any kind.
Can you give an example of when this is bad for the target of the ad instead of the organization doing the advertising? Small organizations don't have a right to exist
It is a reaction to an action. Smallish, discrete boards telling me your shop is around the corner selling sodas? Fine. Blinking, screaming, distracting, life-endangering bullshit boards? No.
Advertising is out of control. Doing mundane things like filling up fuel at a petrol stations, or catching a lift at work - there is a little screen targeting you with ads.
I don't think we really need to do that. In the US, advertising certain types of products (tobacco and alcohol, to name a couple) to children is illegal. So clearly the law already knows what an advertisement is, and how to define it in such a way that seems to get the job done from a legal perspective.
Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising. Instead, distributors have to want to distribute the content because they think their audience will be interested in consuming it - a high bar to hit if the main purpose of your media is to push a product.
Paid actors, and for example company representatives, do count as acting on behalf of the company and therefore don't count as paid advertising. But, whatever medium they are talking to has to be an unpaid medium. A company representative (or paid actor) talking about a product in an interview is okay if the interviewer / distributor is not being paid to host the interview. (or if the interviewer / distributor is the company itself - that's also allowed).
Does that give massive companies an advantage? I would argue not really, because it creates massive overheads for pushing advertisement content, and since you aren't allowed to pay for distribution, it means that people have to be interesting in consuming your content of their own volition instead of other content that isn't trying to push products.
> Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising.
I'm a bit confused.
When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?
Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)
So when say Comcast owns a sports team and runs videos promoting the idea of buying a ticket to see that sports team it wouldn't be an ad because Comcast didn't pay itself?
I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
How about mentioning a product in health ad (Smoking kills. Nicotine patches help you quit smoking)?
Traditionally, the government setup some regulatory body to oversee these kind of exemptions. These body often corrupt over time. Is a corrupted regulatory body better than no exemptions allowed?
Do we want the legal text cover all cases and become so dense that nobody can comprehend? Or do we want some simple rules and live with the possible unintended consequences?
and the most important question : People hate changes and some industries need to rethink their own business. How could we get people agrees on this in a democratic setting?
What is considered payment? Is that just money? Some advertisements could be paid for with goods services or favors. Which of those do we ban? Is proselyting religion advertising?
Bribery laws, SEC insider trading/collusion stuff...there's many existing examples for definitions for that, when the law doesn't want something to be for sale.
I would define "advertisement" in this context as "paying someone else to say something of your choosing".
So, in the case of a billboard, if you are paying a landlord, that's advertising. If you are paying a newspaper to print a specific article, that's also advertising. This means paid press releases are also not allowed. Product placement would fall under this definition too - if a specific car brand is paying you to feature their cars in a movie, that's advertising.
Notably, it's not advertising if no payment is being made. If you are making a movie and you decide to feature a specific car brand - and you aren't getting any kickbacks for it - that's completely allowed.
It's also not advertising if it's first-party. For example, a sign that's advertising a restaurant is allowed if the actual restaurant itself is underneath that sign. And it's also not advertising if Disney is pushing Disney movies and products at Disney World, because Disney owns the full creative rights to Disney World and they aren't being paid by outsiders to adjust the messaging.
This definition can even be robust to grey areas like "what if a car brand makes a movie featuring their cars?" - well, how is that movie being distributed? Are they paying people to distribute the movie, or is it genuinely a good movie that people are distributing on their own? Paying people to distribute the movie is not allowed, but if the movie is good enough that people are distributing it anyway of their own volition, then it's okay!
Overall, the definition is pretty large, and paid promotion is so deeply ingrained into modern society that it's difficult to imagine exactly how much would change if advertising was banned. But, quite a lot would change! Pretty much the entire playbook for all commercial enterprises for "how to tell the world about your thing" would have to be re-written, and new institutions would have to be developed to replace advertising.
But I think society overall would benefit greatly from the change!
One thing that I think makes only targeting paid advertising a problem: companies often do more than one thing.
Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?
Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?
I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.
I'm actually okay with the things you mentioned. The really salient example for me is: should Disney be allowed to advertise Disney movies and Disney products at Disney world? The answer seems to be a pretty obvious yes to me. If you are at Disney World, you are in the "Disney Ecosystem", and so there's nothing wrong with Disney pushing more Disney stuff at you - that's just part of the experience.
I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.
How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.
So if I pay somebody independent to hand out leaflets, that's advertising. But if I employ somebody in the position of leafleteer, now it doesn't count.
Section 1. Ban on Commercial Advertisements
All commercial advertisements, in any medium, are hereby prohibited throughout the United States.
Section 2. Definition
For purposes of this Act, “commercial advertisement” means any paid or otherwise sponsored message intended to promote the sale or use of goods, services, or commercial ventures.
Section 3. Enforcement and Penalties
Violations of this Act shall be subject to civil or criminal penalties as determined by the courts.
The thing is going to hit the courts anyways. Just craft it in a way that hits the Pareto curve on effectiveness vs legality.
1: a public notice
*especially* : a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)
3: something resembling an advertisement (as in alerting someone to something)
Though I also like @trgn's reference to Justice Potter's Definition[0].
I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.
But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.
But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?
Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.
Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].
[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.
Absolutely agree. If you follow it all the way, advertising and the insatiable demand for consumer attention is the root of so many of our social problems. 24 hour network news bubbles, social media addiction, pharmaceutical companies spending more on advertising than R&D, etc. It all comes down to companies having to abuse the end users because to leave advertising money on the table is to go out of business.
> If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring.
I disagree. Lots of entities want to get information out, and they're all competing for attention. This includes a lot of manipulative information, but it's also true for important information. Say that I'm a government agency tasked with informing the public that a certain brand of car seat is unsafe, or just reminding people that wearing safety equipment is a good idea. I can't just publish it on the agency website, confident that everybody will routinely check it. People don't work like that. So, if I really want people to listen, I have to compete in the same way that ads do. And this of course explains why the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's online presence is batshit insane: https://bsky.app/profile/cpsc.gov . It needs to be. They need Sentinel Burrito to warn you that unattended cooking is the #1 cause of house fires because otherwise our stupid brains won't listen.
> Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement
This sprint to the extreme is how one ensures we cannot ban billboards. (If I worked for a billboard company, I would try to frame a billboard ban as a ban on ads.)
There's good and bad from advertising. I think it needs to be regulated and restricted more than banned. They did some study and where advertising was banned prices were higher because low cost providers couldn't put up a get it cheaper here ad. In the UK solicitors are banned from advertising and it makes getting one an expensive pain in the arse.
In olden days we used to get a classified ads newspaper through the door and that was good as you could pick it up if you wanted to check out the ads or ignore/chuck it otherwise. I'd be fine with ads if I had to click to see them. It's having them in your face when you don't want them that's a pain.
You may not like billboards, but they are a form of expression and free speech. Admittedly against banning them. Have y’all not learned anything from the last election? Cancel culture and stifling free speech is not a strategy.
Let’s strike a deal. Let’s take the current city design boards and repurpose them so that instead of micromanaging stucco colors and setbacks they’re micromanaging visual advertising.
The plumber could be lowering prices, or focusing on making his customers happy enough that they recommend to a friend. Instead that money/effort is going into a dimension that has nothing to do with good plumbering. That's bad behavior.
This is out of touch with how businesses get going though. If you depend on word of mouth only as a plumber you’ll be out of business before you even get started.
Are you suggesting to wait around the hardware parking lot to hope to hear about someone who needs a plumber?
I think that if we did not live in a world where our attention was under attack all the time, it would make sense to develop a P2P search protocol for this sort of thing. Could be standard community driven open source, could be a government sponsored project, could be a crypto thing, lots of options here...
The plumber would dedicate a raspberry pi or yesteryear's phone with the bad battery or cracked screen, and they'd leave it plugged in in a closet somewhere and configure it to talk to a few peers who they know personally and who will vouch for their legitimacy. They of course would be vouching for others in the same way.
Nodes would gossip about services that are available, so you could figure out which plumbers are nearby and which of your peers trust those plumbers. Since you're operating on a web of trust, you can find a mutually trusted third party to act as a mediator in the case of disputes, and if you have a good or bad experience you can also gossip that info to your peers so that they can aggregate a sort of review system. But unlike Amazon's, it's full of people that you know and explicitly trust, so it's much harder to game since there's no single source of truth to target/abuse.
It would exchange the kind of information that traditionally comes via ads, but I think it would be so much more effective than ads because all parties want it to succeed--whereas ads have carved out a rather hostile landscape for this sort of thing.
This is obviously an uncharitable interpretation of the comment that you're replying to.
A better question would be how is seeing ads for sports betting in between periods of a game promoting bad behavior.
And the answer to that is very obvious -- the legalization of online sports betting and the nonstop barrage of ads for it on tv and social media is bad for individuals and society as a whole.
For large companies, sure. Large companies abuse everything though; tax, regulatory, worker rights, human rights etc. I have no clue how to fix it in a capitalist winner takes all world, but that's the problem, not advertising.
Small companies (few people) need advertising to get any reach normally.
There is zero chance that capitalism will solve this problem.
Even if you personally choose not to buy overly advertised goods, the overwhelming majority of people will not make the same choice. Advertising works extremely well, and it will always work no matter what you or I do.
So we will still have the problem of excessive advertising, which negatively impacts even people who try to ignore that advertising.
This sounds like sarcasm but I’ll assume the best interpretation.
Why do you think unregulated capitalism will solve the advertising problem? Other than what I am guessing your point is to relying on a large portion to punish bad advertisers and that eventually those companies will do boring adverts.
Clearly the average Joe/Jane is persuadable, and does not have an iron will to never be manipulated.
Clearly unrestrained advertisement is how we got here in the first place.
Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution").
They're banned in 4 US states already, with seemingly no infringement on the 1st Amendment.
Legally speaking, the validity of banning billboards tends to be evaluated based on the Central Hudson test. More practically, there's numerous limitations to commercial speech... for example, you can't blare an audio ad from your rooftop.
>Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution"). Let me know how that goes!
For most of US history, Commercial speech was not afforded full free speech rights. Nor does it currently enjoy them, although it is more protected than it used to be[0]:
Commercial speech, as the Supreme Court iterated in Valentine v. Chrestensen
(1942)[1], had historically not been viewed as protected under the First
Amendment. This category of expression, which includes commercial
advertising, promises, and solicitations, had been subject to significant
regulation to protect consumers and prevent fraud. Beginning in the 1970s,
however, the Supreme Court gradually recognized this type of speech as
deserving some First Amendment protection.
As such, it wouldn't require repealing anything. Just reinterpreting how the First Amendment applies (or not) to commercial speech. And given the wholesale tossing out of precedent by recent SCOTUS personnel, it's certainly possible (albeit unlikely -- and more's the pity -- in this configuration) for them to do so.
I don't know what you mean by "full" free speech rights. But for the last 50 years, under the Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts courts, pure commercial speech has been held to be protected by the First Amendment. The Burger court overturned Valentine.
Right, but there is past (obsolete) precedent that suggests otherwise. If Valentine can be overturned, then the current way of thinking can also be changed.
The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
>The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
And the opinions on Gruen v. New York, Dobbs v. Jackson, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and especially on point, Citizen's United all broke with long precedent and turned things upside down. No amendments to repeal/change, just a different set of folks on SCOTUS.
And those were pretty dumb. So perhaps we'll have some improvement eventually, although I probably won't live to see it. And more's the pity.
> "The fact that it is self-regulated now, that’s not something brewers would want to put in jeopardy," Kirkpatrick said. "It’s the way they have operated for decades. You show a lot of people enjoying a football game or enjoying a baseball game but you don’t show any consumption. I don't think you’re going to see that change."
> A Heineken beer commercial said regulations ban showing someone drinking beer on camera. If you take a more relaxed view of regulations, that’s close to the truth. The rules come from the television networks, not the government. The restriction might not have the force of law but it’s just as effective. We rate the claim Mostly True.
Not only that, but they were then told to post forced speech by a court not let locations that sell cigarettes.
Whatever, I don't see the difference between PMI/RJR advertising and Anheuser-Busch, and Bayer, and Pfizer, and the US Army, and six car insurance companies all claiming to have the lowest rates and best service.
I kicked television out of my house in 2002. I don't have any streaming services provided by a third party, nor do I really listen to the FM band on my car radio, nor XM. The ads are too many to bear.
Pihole, ad nauseam. If you bypass my pihole, my browser clicks every ad you show and sends the data to /dev/null except what site, timestamp, and a thumbnail of the ad. Its not botting; I'm actively hostile to advertising.
Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment. Regulations of commercial speech need to pass the "Central Hudson Test", which requires a compelling government interest (subject to heightened scrutiny) and narrowly-tailored regulation. Under this rubric, you can get cigarette ads off billboards, but you probably can't regulate Nike's ads.
If SCOTUS can develop a test to determine when the government is allowed to violate 1A, then they can loosen that test's requirements. They won't, of course, but I don't see why they couldn't, if they wanted to.
Nobody is surprised that a Republican or Democratic nominee might have a strong take regarding Roe v Wade, because it's practically a litmus test for nomination. No nominee has ever been asked about Central Hudson v PSC NY. There's a reason for that. It's been 50 years and 3 different distinct courts and the only thing that seems to have happened with this body of case law is that protections for commercial speech have gotten stronger.
> Nobody is surprised that a Republican or Democratic nominee might have a strong take regarding Roe v Wade, because it's practically a litmus test for nomination.
The point is they'll openly say "settled law" and then immediately unsettle it. "Corporations get free speech" is a concept granted over time (and fairly recently) by the courts, not explicitly laid out in the Constitution. (Doubly so at the state level; it wasn't until the 1920s that SCOTUS even said the First Amendment applied to states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v._New_York)
> It's been 50 years…
Right about the same amount of time Roe v. Wade stuck around.
Look, this current Court certainly isn't gonna ban advertising; if anything, it's more likely to permit government-required advertisements right into our Neuralink headsets… but a future Court could easily say fast food advertising or social media for minors is just as bad as cigarette advertising was.
So, I dug into this somewhat deeply, and it's true that there's some case law which would make an outright ban of commercial advertising difficult, however:
The law is pretty consistent about the idea that any paid endorsement has to be "truthful". And as we've learned more about sociology and advertising, we've realized that things like paid endorsements are fundamentally not truthful, because they are misleading the public to believe that some figure or trusted source (even if only at a subconscious level - which is still enough to change consumer behavior!) is in favor of a product or brand.
So maybe if you could argue that paid speech is inherently untruthful (which I believe that it is!), then you could make legal policy that bans paid speech complaint with the First Amendment! (caveat: I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal activist, etc)
Read Va Pharmacy vs Va Citizens Consumer Council to get a sense for how well you're going to fare with "paid speech is inherently untruthful". It's addressed directly!
Sure, and after that let’s ban: potato chips, sugar water, sex outside the hours of 6:00 - 7:00 PM, caffeine, plastic straws, and non-bran-based cereals.
Yes, people need to take care of themselves, but part of that involves a degree of personal responsibility.
“Let’s ban paid advertisement.” This is not a serious discussion.
I think it’s a nonstarter that conflicts with 1st amendment principles, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment that you’re expressing. Things like this are just the price we pay for living in a free / democratic society. But kudos to you for thinking outside the box.
How about you stop advocating for using the coercive power of the state to ban harmless speech or things you simply dislike? If a property owner wants to allow billboards on their building, they have every right to do so.
I just went through some of your comment history, and it strikes me as interesting that you very recently said:
"It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda"
This is exactly what you just did by fabricating knowledge of my aesthetic taste. I hope this fact is as intriguing to you as it is to me.
Who says I don't like the aesthetic? I can like the aesthetic of something and also acknowledge the harm it causes. It's kinda weird that your response is to make things up about me here.
If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.