- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
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.
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.
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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
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.)
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They are still illegal in many countries.
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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…
People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.
Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That’s where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.
None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.
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.
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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.
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People who think they have a right to deface other people’s property say the weirdest shit.
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Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it’s not.
Laws change.
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In both situation you make it illegal for corporations to do something, and punish them with fines and criminal sentences for executives if they’re caught doing so, leading to a decrease in that behaviour.
So what about the situations do you see as different that makes it a false equivalency?
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It’s already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
And if you have the name of your business and what you sell on your store front? That’s advertising. Or a card with your name on it to hand out to customers or coupons. That’s advertising. Or logos on clothing or a sign that sits near the road that says SALE. That is advertising.
OP was downvoted for saying the truth, regulation is important, but businesses will fail if they have no way to catch your interest.
In fact it gets worse because small businesses will never be seen because nobody will have heard of them and everyone goes to the big store everyone already knows about.
There is balance to be had…
Lemmy is essentially just like Reddit at this point. It’s just a bunch of the lowest common denominator circle jerking a lack of critical thinking.
You cannot have intelligent discussion, and group think is all that matters. Folks will not read your comment, they will find the single phrase they disagree with and hold onto it for dear life, missing the entire point.
And then ignore the whole premise and idea behind the discussion and reply in a way that makes absolutely no sense if they had average reading comprehension…
I miss the old Internet, where you could actually have discussions and pass ideas back and forth.
Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better
We have this in Maine and it’s wonderful. Any time I drive through another state, the gross billboards are such a jolting sight (and blight).
I’ve been saying that for a long time about MI, were a tourist state for its natural beauty but it’s ruined by all the billboards fucking up our views.
We don’t have billboards here on O’ahu and it’s great. When I went to visit my family on the continental US (Boston and Florida), it was very annoying and distracting to see them everywhere.
but where’s the line between giant TVs on buildings and billboards?
The way the Maine law works, you are only allowed to have billboard-like signage (whether digital or old school) if it’s on the premises of the business. No off-premise billboards or screens are allowed. And digital signage must not be too bright or distracting for drivers.
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.
There is some awareness effect, too. If I like burgers and see a listing for a new burger place in my neighborhood, learning about a potential new place I’d like to include in my going-out rotation feels like a win. If I need a home repair and see a neighbor with a yard sign for a local contractor, that’s helpful in compiling a list of potential companies to check out.
What about word of mouth? If I want to find a good place to eat, I find asking a local “hey what’s the best restaurant around here?” to yield way better results than ads.
It would be totally sufficient if those things are listed in search engines or maps. Not as ads for other searches but as actual results when you actually search for that stuff. If you like burgers it would be no problem for you to type “burger near me” into your favourite search engines once in a while if you feel like something new. Same for home repair etc.
Getting rid of advertising in a capitalist society would be devastating for all new and small businesses. Start an IT company, tow truck company, Trash removal, plumber, electrician, pest, all dead. Really any company that isnt already known would likely die, and the current large companies would be the only ones that exist. Also what counts as advertising, am I going to jail for telling my friend about a new game I tried? That’s advertising.
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.
That’s advertising. The entire phone book was a sold adventure. Jail, prison, what is the punishment for advertising. I think people have forgotten what advertising is. I ask you you favorite movie, you answer, advertising. If you tell me Lemmy is a decent place, advertising. Any app, game, movie, music, software, hardware, car, plant, advertising. Stop talking about any object if you want ALL advertising to be illegal as the description says
bear in mind that the linked article expands and clarifies that it doesn’t mean banning all ads, it’s is talking about banning specifically paid ads (i.e. the advertised thing is spending money to be shown) and/or third-party ads (i.e. the advertised thing being shown in places that don’t already refer to them). So word of mouth is fine, a business catalog book is fine, all comparison/customer review/keyword search sites are fine, etc. The one thing I can think about is the smaller companies and businesses finding it much harder to gain traction, but word of mouth would replace advertisements and word of mouth is already quite effective - see the very site we’re talking on right now!
Curious how you landed in the past, haha. I saw your response and couldn’t remember what it was about. Yeah it was mostly a dumb comment I probably made while drunk.
oh my god i completely missed the fact that i was replying to a year-old comment 😭
please ignore, didn’t mean to necropost lol
You’re absolutely right. Any small business left would beg big corporations for buyouts, for pennies on the dollar. Small time influencers would skirt it by the millions. It’d make cyberpunk fiction look tame.
It might be better if some “standard catalog” was popularized, but still a calamity.
Yeah I mean a had a Lyft driver give me a card for her son the other day who opened a mobile hair salon. Is it useful for people, sure. Could he exist without advertising, absolutely not.
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Sao Paolo did this in 2006.
Under the cult of the “Invisible Hand of the Free Market”, the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.
How did it go? Why did they stop it?
As far as I can tell, they didn’t stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo’s ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.
Thank you for the links. I’ve been there recently, and everything felt cold and gray. I could not really understand why, since all of Brazil feels so charming, green and vivid. Maybe your argument explains a part of it: since there is no advertising, there aren’t many colors on the streets (it might’ve been my impression, tho’).
that’s interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there’s certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!
There are! And a lot too!
The thing is: São Paulo is a city made mostly to walk. Going by car is a nightmare, and public transportation (the metro) is quite good. The center of it all, the most iconic place, the “avenida paulista” is quite iconic, but full of gray. The main attraction are the buildings, which are huge. I’d say most of them are banks. And the more you go around, the more you feel the need of green places.
It’s a big city, there are some huge murals and street art, but it feels cold. As if it was put there just to check a mark on a “good city needs this” list, but not as natural evolution of the city.
The things I’ve felt there:
- Huge city, truly makes you feel small
- The floor, walls and sky are all gray, all the time
- People are stressed and running to go from place A to place B
- Lots of homeless people, everywhere. Not a shelter around nor anything close to help those people.
I’m grateful to you for digging those up.
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?
I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn’t a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.
What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.
Adding “destructive fines” to my list
If fines aren’t a percentage of quarterly or annual earnings they don’t matter. Ten million to a company earning billions isn’t even a rounding error. But 30% of their gross. They’d respect that. They’d have to.
“We need a large group of ideologically committed bureaucrats willing to impose policy in the face of a defiant, intractable established opposition” is simultaneously true and not terribly helpful, unless you can show where these people are coming from.
Like, we’ve seen instances of this happen before. Elon’s DOGE is a great current example of a group of ideologically dedicated barn burners. The OG FBI was another great example of a department effectively founded to militantly oppose a well-financed and popular opposition. FDR’s court appointees (and his arm-twisting with the threat to further pack the courts) could be considered another.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations (other than the Trump Tariff goons, I guess)? Dems are Pro-Business. Republicans are Pro-Fascist Business. There is no leadership, outside of a handful of die-hards like AOC and Bernie - who could conceivably be both willing and able to execute on these kinds of reforms.
I wish there was. But this is just pie-in-the-sky dreaming until you can find a municipal or state government with the kind of people engaged enough to rally for it and seek promotion to the federal level on this kind of platform.
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FDR also came into the presidency after a devastating economical collapse which we are just one ecological disaster away from experiencing.
#YES, PLEASE.
I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:
- I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
- I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
- I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
- The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
- Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
- Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.
It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.
As someone who had designed and attempted to sell things. On of my key takeaways has always been the lack of awareness or knowledge of my things exists.
Granted if I put a 50ft build board in the sky it wouldn’t change much. But if I did more than I did… or am doing it would help.
I saw a metaphor in this thread comparing advertising to Smoking. But I think Sugar is a better comparison. Is it needed? No. But a little will go a long way, and some dishes wouldn’t exists without it. Add to much and it ruins the flavour of the dish and isn’t healthy for the consumer.
What is needed is balance and where everything has hyper sugar in it isn’t good for anyone. So I do we need a rethink, but eliminating it outright isn’t the solution.
Wondering about a world where advertising is only allowed on purchasing platforms. Say the consumer wants shoes. They go on this platform to search for shoes, and at that point advertisement is allowed. On this platform you can get related ads, front page ads etc. The moment you step off that platform however no ads are allowed.
The platforms can be like digital malls. Maybe owned by the government, or possibly functioning like a decentralised platform.
Online stores would be the exact wrong place imho. Take amazon, it become a outdated and rotten because of advertising changing the ranking and fake reviews and endless duplicates of items. There is also a lack of advancement for filtering. You’d want more trustworthy reviews, information, measurements and also more community functions to help find what you really need. Advertising would run counter to all of that.
Amazon is a bad example, as it’s a company with financial incentive. Hence my idea to either have it hosted by a government or a decentralized platform.
If a company owned it without good external overview then I agree we get what amazon is today.
Just nationalize amazon haha
I’m yoinking that sugar analogy, explains the issue really well!
I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusions. Currently you need a lot of capital to market a new product. That shifts the balance of power away from entrepreneurs towards the capitalists. Marketing also has a larger impact on profits than engineering, which leads to non-engineers to gain more promotions and power.
Instead we could have reviews, testing institutions, forums where people exchange opinions. And “pay for play” would be illegal fraud. But there would be constant demand to learn and compare the quality of products, once the focus on emotional manipulation is gone.
And existing brands from conglomerates spend oodles of money to maintain their brands, so you would immediately see a shift in power towards entrepreneurs and new and better products. You’d gain far more than you’d loose.
Another issue is that we are hyperstimulating consumerism which has not just negative effects, but leads to existential risk now.
I agree for existing products. But for new products before reviews are there. It’s very very hard to make your product stand out. Or to convince buyers to try it out.
Well it’s hard to imagine a world without advertising and just speculation, but there are a lot of videos on youtube and articles about new products. And stuff that is interesting would get upvotes, get shared and be trending. Of course there would need to be a different monetization scheme for youtubers.
The thing is I don’t think I would mind advertising if it wasn’t shoved down my throat 24/7. The fact I can’t read a webpage without ads blocking everything, I can’t watch TV without more than half of the show’s runtime being ads in and out of segments, I can’t even step outside without seeing the billboard or another 5 ads shoved in my mailbox!
I get 15 some-odd emails a day from different companies trying to get me to buy things. I block them and they pop up with a different email address. I can’t even open my email without ads popping up masquerading as actual messages (Gmail). Don’t get me started on the entire Google app thing.
I can’t open an online map without getting SPONSERED listings. And places I use the app to order from try to advertise me their own food WHILE I’M ORDERING. Panda Express started asking me if I want a subscription to Starz or whatever.
NO. NO. NO.
I’m exhausted. I want to go to a store without being immediately inundated with ads or sellers. “Buy this!” NO. LEAVE ME ALONE.
I’m overwhelmed. I’m overstimulated. I’m done. I don’t care how “quirky” or “flashy” or “hip” your ads are. I refuse to buy anything I see ads for now. It’s too much. Shut up.
TL;DR: we need controls and limits to who, what, where, and how things are advertised. It should be an enforcable crime to have ads louder than a certain decibel for one. But it’s not enforced and fines aren’t more than a drop in the bucket. I doubt I’ll see it in ny lifetime.
Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it’s not something that can change based on individual effort.
You also can’t escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.
I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.
Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.
PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie “Branded (2012)” which dramatizes this idea.
Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start.
This is less because of that and more copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe as such, so the framing and layout and bullshit narrative are there to fix that.
You don’t need a very long blurb for that. A short paragraph would do fine. Tons of cookbooks have figured this out.
You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.
You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.
So in your hypothetical advertising free world we also don’t have search engines, at all? Or at least search engine results specifically don’t favor long blog posts?
SEO as we know it is a hugely marketing driven thing. The recipe blog does it because they want to bring eyeballs from Google search results, which gives them advertising revenue. Google optimizes their rules for SEO to likewise bring in Google AdSense money.
Search engines would exist, but the incentives are all different.
Right, but the food blog is still going to end up with an incentive for people to see it, so they’re still going to SEO because they can’t get subs/patrons/whatever they get income from from people who don’t know they exist. So, the implication is that search engines would preference a different style of food blog in the absence of advertising?
I mean, if you want my radical answer, it’s that people would write food blogs because they like giving out recipes in a mutual aid society. They don’t care about SEO, because it’s just a bother. Traffic will come to them organically or it won’t.
The hypothetical was a world without advertising, not a world without capitalism. You could make a food blog for the love of it without caring if anyone reads it or not now, but you likely wouldn’t bother with SEO if you did for the same reason.
Cool idea but we live under the violent imposition of capitalism.
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.
