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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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.
“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.
The economy should exist to serve real needs of the people. All that advertisement does is create a fake desire for consumption which simply wastes respurces.
It’s also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.
Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.
It’s a “rich get richer” mechanic that any halfway competent dev would’ve patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.
It’s also such a funny contradiction: a big part of the free market model rests on the idea that well informed consumers can vote with their wallet, which should reward good businesses and punish bad ones. Yet it is very difficult to argue consumers have ever been informed enough to make this work, which is in large part due to advertising flooding communication channels with noise, and also because it is unreasonable to expect a consumer to be fully informed for the hundreds of purchases they make on a daily basis.
You cannot get away from advertising, ever, in any society, in any financial system, at any point of time in history after tribal societie.
It’s a concept that you can’t just “ban”, nearly all the problems we have with it today is because it’s uncontrolled and abused. The concept itself though is as unbannable as the concept of “selling” something.
The concept:
“trying to find someone who can use something you made”
Is literally as old as humans moving away from tribal societies.
You can make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows about it, it’s still useless.
Lmao, this is absolute defeatist nonsense.
“You’ve gotta help us doc, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.
Because here’s the thing, you literally just can ban advertising. Ban billboards, ban tv Ads, ban social media advertising.
You can still have companies publish information about their product, but that’s not what advertising is in the context of this discussion.
Right there are plenty of ways for businesses to get consumers to choose to use their product other than advertising which are far more conducive to consumers being able to make an informed purchase decision without being manipulated. But doing so would upend the existing power structures of who gets to sell more product, so disturbing the status quo just requires more political will than anybody really has.
You can find ads for products in Roman republic era graffiti. We have had ads for thousands of years.
Graffiti, you say? So it was probably illegal.
I know the rule of law is in sad shape right now, but companies still avoid doing illegal shit right out in the open, and that’s all that’s needed to cut back dramatically on advertising.
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.
I wouldve left an awful review, 1 star, no tip. Thats such shit to do. Fuck that guy.
I’ve literally never understood the advertising industry.
Like, a company gives another company money to waste bandwidth… How many people even watch ads? As a kid, that’s when you’d leave the TV to get a drink or use the bathroom. As an adult, I run adblockers and haven’t see an advertisement in ages - yet these companies are continuing to spend money on this?
What’s worse is how they actually think people associate the random shit that plays before/during the content you want to watch to the point that they’re forcing creators to dumb down the content. Like, I get it if the platform itself is shit, but come on. If you REALLY want to know what’s harming your brand, it wouldn’t be the guy saying “shit fuck” 50 times, it would be the fucking advertisement that’s breaking the flow and interrupting the guy saying “shit fuck” 50 times. I’d sooner see people avoiding these products specifically because of the negative association.
You and I both. But we are not the norm. And advertising works (even on us when we do end up seeing them).
It’s bizarre to me to be around my parents and others who just let ads play, and watch them, and engage about them. But people just get used to them and everyone thinks THEY aren’t swayed by them. We are though - which is why I would completely support banning ads beyond basic signage for businesses and outside of dedicated locations where I can go when I actually need something.
