- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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 don’t like to buy anything I’ve seen advertised. I just don’t trust it
what if we made capitalism illegal? because all of the bullshit like advertising is symptomatic. the root cause is capitalism. western civilization has to be reset entirely. and it will never get done through protesting.
Yeah with advances in software and AI you could also manage the economy much more efficient and in real time than the old “planned economy”. Shortages and problems could be handled quickly. With crowd funding you could also have banks providing funds for new enterprises (collectives / coops) by people voting democratically on what to approve.
The issue is that I haven’t seen any serious work on improving socialism, which most socialists seem to think is a heretical concept. So there is a lack of valid alternatives to capitalism that people can imagine. And the power balance and technology for propaganda to control the population and weaponry and tactics the stage manage protests has advanced too.
And then there is the issue that no matter what ideology and system, those who desire power or wealth above anything else are more likely to attain it, and we haven’t yet found good antibodies to this fundamental problem of managing power. Or even know about it.
yeah, i def agree about AI managed resources. we need to take away as many opportunities for greed and corruption as possible.
and really, this all comes down to letting science run the show rather than financiers and economists. the economy has replaced common sense.
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.
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…
“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 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.)
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.
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
Don’t forget personal injury or liability lawyers.
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They are still illegal in many countries.
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Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.
There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?
The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.
In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.
Thanks for the thorough comment. I’d say your assessment is accurate. As it is, McDonald’s is a real estate company that also sells hamburgers. Corporations are not waiting for advertisement to be banned before they do those things. They’ve been doing them for a while. We should ban advertisement. The dystopia arrived a while ago.
I agree, as in many more cases it is better to regulate than it is to forbid. Companies and consumers will find a way.
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 @douglasg14b@lemmy.world please share your thoughts on the response from @Maldreamer@lemmy.world?
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).
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.
“THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING”
Freedom from mind flaying (advertising) !
Advertising is pollution
I’ve always thought of it as waste of our mental resources. But pollution describes it even better.
Pollution specifically engineered by psychologists to maximize its impact.
Emotional pollution Mind pollution SOUL POLLUTION
Advertising might be similarly harmful as lead in drinking water.
Tons of companies rely on ad revenue. Netflix, Google etc will go under.
I’d be willing to pay per use, or donate like Wikipedia.
Oh NOOOOOO
My point is - they will not allow that to happen.
In order for something like this to take place you would need a full blown communist revolution
I think regulation is better than abolishing it.
With most initiatives that have been made in good faith to avoid bad actors, it will usually hit the little guy the hardest.
In my country, for example, you can apply for grants for your business for developing your business. Great right? Wrong. The bureaucracy is so crazy that small businesses, whom this grant was aimed towards, cannot feasibly take the grant. It is too expensive for them to go through all the steps to get the money for the developmental aspect of the business that they would lose money as a business and not be able to recoup their losses. The grant money are so small and aren’t allowed to be used to run the business at all that it simply isn’t worth it to even try. You would essentially have to work for free for days or weeks in some cases to get this tiny portion that will now sink your company instead of developing it.
However, a big business with many employees and time and money to spare, could easily apply for the grant and get it without a sweat, despite them not needing it at all.
That is how I’d see a potential ban of ads affect the market. The big businesses who got to benefit from ads and marketing in the past will continue to do well because people know them while any and all new start ups and smaller businesses would drown and go bankrupt due to them not being allowed to make people aware of their business.
It is a bit too utopic for my taste to suggest a ban. But regulation would be a good thing in my opinion.
So this could be interpreted as ban big advertising from ads?
I think ultimately tightening of ad standards is likely the middle ground. I for one am sick of the blatant bulletin. As an industrial chemist even the freakin chemical companies do it. Like buddy, I’m a chemist, I need to know what it is to use it properly. I have now started running a campaign where if they don’t cough up the deets, I (in consultancies) don’t recommend the use of their products.
The best way to make advertising uninteresting or useless is to provide an alternative form of making money. If the default way to monetise a website, video, or whatever is ads, then ads will continue to be used. If we actually had an alternative that was as or more lucrative, that’s what would be used.
“Ban it” also means you need a way to enforce it, and even if it were banned in one country, that’s just one country. They might finally come up with an alternative, but why wait for a ban? Why not discuss and test alternatives here instead of just dreaming that a solution magically shows up?
Pretty dumb article if you spend more than a second thinking about this issue.
The entire historical premise that we “didn’t have ads” is so fucking incorrect and reeks of appeal to nature. Yeah we didn’t have tv ads but we had monarchs and elite that played the same role. How is paying of some sleezy high up salesman is different from a Google search ad? If anything the latter is more ethically apt.
I’d take democracy with ads over whatever the fuck that alternative timeline that polices “unpaid word of mouth”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to live there. I can’t tell you how sick I am of ads. I’ve seen a lifetime of advertisements and I’m done.
