"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
One reason why the definition is more important when it comes to outlawing behavior is that when you get it wrong you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.
Ironically this is something lawyers and judges would pick up on immediately. You need an underlying principle of harm that can be applied consistently.
> you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.
There are many things individuals will consider "important and valuable to them" that are harmful to others.
We prevent individuals from harming others for their own self-gain because that's what societies do.
This is an argument against people having rights at all. "Oh, you think you're entitled to X? Well, in certain scenarios, X might cause harm. You might use free speech to advocate for something bad, or leverage your immunity to unjust search & seizure to conceal evidence of a crime."
Consider that the author considers propaganda to be a form of advertising, and suggests we ban propaganda. Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant. This anti-propaganda law effectively would have to make it illegal to publish political opinion pieces. That would be absurdly draconian.
For the record, I'm strongly anti-advertising, but a complete ban on advertisement would be impossible to construct because you can't draw a sharp line between ads and free expression.
> Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant.
Actually (and hilariously) Fox News according to their own court filings do not publish news, they are an entertainment product.
And I say ironically because that's exactly the mechanism people are clamoring for in this discussion: it's the courts. Lawyers argue and courts eventually decide definitions all the time, because it's highly impractical to belabor and endlessly debate passing new laws because we don't have ironclad definitions in them beforehand.
If you want my humble opinion, in a legal/ban sense, I would define advertising as:
> Communicative material that is placed strategically by publishers or media for a price/by way of other agreement to drive awareness of products or services with the intent to generate attention and sales of said products or services.
Kudos for providing a somewhat sensible definition. This helps by addressing the free speech issues (at least to an extent^[1]), but I think there are other problems as well.
The economical fallout would be extensive. Google's and Meta's business model (and that of many others) would basically disappear overnight. While I'm not a fan of either, and think there should be much stricter regulation for (very large) tech-companies, this would make financing of a lot of important products infeasible. But not just in tech. Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc.
Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
Also, it would make entering markets much harder, if you're not a household name already. If I read your definition correctly, you couldn't even give a complimentary account for your SaaS product to a reviewer ("by way of other agreement") to enable them to test your software (and hopefully write favorably about it if they're convinced).
This would definitely hurt consumers.
I think you should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything, we should outlaw the massive tracking effort involved in advertising.
[1]: What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff? Is that okay? I could construct more examples, and life is even messier. On the other hand, I have to admit, that the focus on the payment aspect makes this much more palatable to me.
There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on. Turns out, if you’re selling products people need, momentary disruptions and changing market conditions generally don’t mean you suddenly cannot conduct business.
> Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
One of sport fans biggest complaints is the overwhelming number of ads and the overbearing, bloated organizations behind pro tier sports. It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
And it’s not like pro sports aren’t already benefitting from taxpayers left and right. We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
> This would definitely hurt consumers.
Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
> What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff?
I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
> There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on.
Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.
> It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
I disagree. I don't think the state has any place here. And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
> We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
If there's less money in it, there will be less supply, so I don't see how it would be easier for people to afford attendance.
Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
> Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
SaaS was just an example for a new product trying to gain market share.
Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept. Afterwards they're practically forced to not use it, because it's much harder to get one off the ground.
> I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics. I can see it.
> Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.
It wasn't a moral argument, though I can see how you read it that way. I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.
They complained about us not letting them keep cancer-causing chemicals in the break room too, mandatory break times for given lengths of work shifts, etc. etc. etc. They always whine about they'll go broke if they have to X or Y, no matter how reasonable it is.
> And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits unless directed to by weird politicians who think public goods should make money, like the current head of the USPS. Generally, tax funded orgs are just us going "we would like this service, and everyone in the city/county/state/country chipping in like $30 a year means we don't need to worry about it.
> Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
Yeah, again. Fund it with taxes. Little league players shouldn't be billboards. If we want this stuff, we should have the political will to allocate money to pay for it. I don't see why if we decide we want little league baseball that said baseball team should then need to make the rounds in the community with a hat out. That's silly.
> Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept.
No they aren't. If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
> Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics.
I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it. The pro-WWII ads that sold bonds were propaganda. The cartoons depicting Hitler as a buffoon were propaganda.
In any case though, I wouldn't consider that advertising. In my mind, advertising would only occur when a given publication is including content referencing a product or service where it would normally not otherwise be.
> I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.
Ah, got it. Then I'd say we should only regulate things that need regulation. I don't think advertising is one of these. The data collection happening in the background on the other hand...
> State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits [...]
Yes, but people generally do, even when they're funded by government. They just lose the incentive to create a good product.
> Yeah, again. Fund [the local little league] with taxes.
No. Why should I pay for something like that?
> If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
Yes. And there's LibreOffice, GIMP/Inkscape and GNUCash (and many others) if you don't like that model.
BTW, these aren't what I was thinking about. I assume big players would generally be favored by such a prohibition, because they're already known to a wide audience.
> I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it.
I agree with you, but the article explicitly lumps together propaganda and advertising. I think that's dangerous. Socialists should be free to make their case, even though I think it's idiotic
So is the fallout from Trump's new tariffs, yet they still got done.
I don't think the government cares about economic fallout unless it affects billionaires, so you're right, advertising will never be banned because it would cut into the profits of the president's richest and most vocal supporters.
My point is that US government economic policy is completely disconnected from the concept of economic fallout, so it seems silly to consider that a gating item for this hypothetical.
I read that as "the US government is already crippling the economy, so other measures potentially crippling the economy are not a problem," but maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
> My point is that US government economic policy is completely disconnected from the concept of economic fallout
Unless the economic policy stands to benefit the working class.
Tax cuts for billionaires will pass all day, with zero issues at all. Anything, and I do mean anything that stands to benefit the general public has to have three plans on how it will either pay for itself or otherwise be paid for, and if any of them involve even a slight tax increase, it will never even see a vote, let alone pass.
Advertisement is when the ad carrier receive money, goods, services, preference or other monetary equivalent. With this definition we may give a break to free expression of views.
> Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant.
That's not advertising by any standard, unless they're being paid by someone to do it (whether they currently are or not is irrelevant). Just because someone can benefit doesn't make it advertising/propaganda, it's about the whether the funding comes from someone who benefits from the particular content.
As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.
> As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.
Did the pay full retail price for the product or get a discount?
Did they get the product at release or in advance?
Did they get access to detailed specs or the people who built it?
Did they give feedback that went into the product?
Did they get a company/lab/event visit and some swag?
Did they get preferential access for the next product?
"Sponsoring" is just the most visible, clearly disclosed way to advertise in those. But fundamentally, getting and preserving access is immensely valuable and there may not be funds moving between the two groups.
None of us are completely unbiased. Getting those things disclosed would be a great improvement.
This law is no different than any other prohibition. It's not like we have to go back to the legal lab to figure out precisely what advertising is because, unlike things with clear definitions everyone knows like fraud, discrimination, or defamation, advertising is particularly nebulous.
Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.
I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.
>
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is
You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.
> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..
Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> It's so transparent to me now
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"
I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.
I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
I don't claim to know the answer here, but I hope you can see some irony in saying:
> As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
When the thing up for discussion is the hacking of our psyche to impose a will - ads - onto others, at a scale and persistence hereto unimaginable by the worst tyrants in history.
> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> […]
> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
Very well said across the board.
My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.
In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.
Not for nothing, but slippery slope reasoning is a well-known fallacy and more or less an argument against all laws ("first they told me I couldn't kill anyone, now I can't hit anyone, now I can't talk about hitting anyone, now I can't write a story about hitting anyone or think about hitting anyone, murder laws are fascism"). The process of creating laws is about balancing rights, in this case your ability to advertise vs. your ability to be free from advertising and whatever its effects might be. The whole "banning advertising is impossible" argument (in fairness this basically the topic verbatim) is a lot less interesting than trying to find the principle or test where we can say, "this advertising seems useful to humanity" vs. "this advertising seems harmful to humanity". There's very little of the latter happening in this thread, which I think says it all.
Logical fallacies aren't automatic falsehoods. They're things that can't be proven with formal logic.
The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.
The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.
Someone with your eye for detail would probably be embarrassed to learn that while their entire argument rests on me referring to "engineers" I never wrote the word once.
It seems like you're one of those HN people who thinks they'll convince people scrolling by with petty semantic arguments and snark. Maybe that's true! But it doesn't work on me. For example, if you're gonna make a claim like "I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation", I'd want to see evidence that deals with the fact that the courts have come up with their own standards for their own review (rational basis, strict scrutiny) and indeed have formulated their own standards for evaluating legislation entirely on their own (undue burden, imminent lawless action, etc). From your comments in this thread, I'd guess you don't know anything about laws, legislation, judicial review, and the like. But hey, don't let that stop you from warning about the dangers of "destructive power of imposing your will on others".
The difference is that often, particular things are more concretely defined. A ban on advertising might be so onerous you wouldn't even be able to 'advertise' your FOSS projects on HN.
In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?
I don’t think it would be onerous nor ill defined. Simply make it illegal to pay someone to or receive payment for making a public announcement for a product, service, or brand. If no payment is involved, it’s fine. People are free to promote their own or others products on social media, YouTube, the side of their car or house, so long as they aren’t paid to do so. That is hardly any more convoluted or ill-defined than dozens of other laws on the books.
And yes, word of mouth and non-paid advertising is absolutely capable of spreading awareness on its own.
Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
> natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
Ok? If that's how we define "brutal authoritarianism," I guess I'm a brutal authoritarian. There's a natural market for mob hitmen (scarce + in-demand)—are you opposed to a "brutal authoritarian" crackdown on those too?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Citation very much needed. Suppliers of lead paint, asbestos, ozone-destroying aerosols, contaminated foodstuffs, etc. did not regulate themselves in a decentralized manner. In fact, take virtually any toxic contaminant or hazardous product and you'll usually find that the market colluded to cover up evidence of harm, rather than "self-regulating."
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser
Absolutely not. Consumers do not exert demand for certain types of ads in preference to others. There's no mechanism for ads to converge toward high audience value. It's advertiser value that is optimized for, often to the detriment of consumers (e.g. advertisements for profitable scams, which have negative value).
Even if you want to argue that advertisements inform consumers to some extent, that's probably outweighed by the extent that they misinform consumers. Consider infomercial products: Regular kitchen knives don't need an advertisement because demand is inelastic. If you're cooking, you need a knife; nobody has to promote the idea of knives. But the "slap-chop" is a product with elastic demand, and thus the marginal value of advertising is much greater for them. Hence, they can afford to buy up huge amounts of ad space to drum up demand for an essentially worthless product. The advertising ecosystem has perverse incentive to promote scams.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
There are a lot of noxious and socially destructive things which are not practical to ban.
You've taken small snippets of my text and stood them up as lone straw-men to argue against, instead of arguing against my actual premise.
No, murder is not comparable to advertising. And no, not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating" nor did I argue against regulation of advertising.
Your fundamental belief (and the prevailing view on HN) that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect. Apparently I need to say this again because it's hard to grasp the concept of nuance--Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient, but again, markets trend in the direction of efficiency over long periods.
Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people, hence why they can profitably continue advertising over time.
Just because you aren't interested in the product, doesn't mean it's a scam . Enough people in the audience of whatever media you consume think otherwise, hence why the company is advertising there. Again, there are absolutely stupid companies wasting money on stupid ads, but they tend to get outcompeted by the smarter ones. I get it though, giving people you believe are less intelligent than you the freedom to make decisions is frustrating.
Even in your example of the slap-chop, which you say is a "worthless product," funny enough, I literally just used a similar product yesterday to dice a large amount of onions quickly. Guess I'm stupid and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Alternatively though, the idea that knife makers don't promote their products is just hilarious to me. The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive and just because the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot from the 1990s doesn't mean they just throw their products on the market with zero promotion. How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? You're gonna hate this too...turns out shelf space is scarce so shelf space is a market as well, and it's more of an economic calculation than one of technical passion. Oh no not again!
Sure it is. You made a sweeping statement about services in a market; those are both services subject to market forces. You say (supposing for the sake of argument that advertising is as harmful as the article makes it out to be) that a ban would be unacceptably authoritarian and ineffective anyway. Well, we ban harmful things in the market all the time. Such as murder.
> not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating"
No, you said the phrase "decentralized market regulation," which means the same thing as "the market regulating itself," and suggests the absence of any actual regulation whatsoever.
> nor did I argue against regulation of advertising
You said natural markets could only be controlled through authoritarian means, which is always worse than "decentralized market regulation." This is an argument in favour of deregulation.
> Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people
No, they're for products with the largest marginal return on showing ads. That's why you often see ads for pharmaceuticals that only a tiny segment of the population will ever need—because they're highly profitable and thus advertising offers high returns.
> that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect
Intended to *manipulate. Whether they inform or misinform is totally orthogonal to their purpose.
> Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient
The efficient market hypothesis applies specifically to asset markets. There's no real model of what an "efficient price" is for most consumer goods, services, or advertising campaigns, because those are not assets and do not retain market value after sale.
Anyway, this strikes me as a bizarrely dogmatic way to "debunk" the widespread presence of scams in our society. Multi-level marketing schemes have not gone anywhere, nor has the related category of self-help seminar grifts. You can keep a lie going for a very long time, and make a lot of money doing so. "Efficient markets" do not protect us from that reality.
> Guess I'm stupid
…
> and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Try a mandoline slicer, with the julienne teeth up.
> The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive [even though] the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot[.] [...] How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? [...] it's more of an economic calculation
So you're telling me that, when it comes to cooking knives, the incentives at play mean I'm primarily exposed to advertising for scam products? Wow I'm glad we agree.
> Suppliers of lead paint, asbestos, ozone-destroying aerosols, contaminated foodstuffs, etc.
Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available. What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?
> What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?
Unsponsored product reviews, I suppose. I'm not a proponent of a complete ban on advertising—I just find the argument being made in favour of deregulation to be deeply silly.
> Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available.
The argument I'm responding to there is, "Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity." There's no mention there of the availability of alternatives—that's not the point being made.
Replace attention for kidneys. Or not being killed with swords. See how you argument works out.
Just because something is highly sought after e.g. kidneys and protection from violence doesn't mean we should commoditize it. See American health care. Some resources are inflexible and allow infinite rent seeking opportunities.
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).
This is true, but only for the set of messages that produce value that can be captured by the advertiser. This set is a small subset of messages that produce value. For example, a message about the benefits of excercise/socializing/climate action would produce a lot of value, but not in a form that any single advertiser can capture. So a lot of high value messages don't get produced in the current system, and might have a better chance in a more "natural" attention economy.
Advertising also increases the value of a product, so the value of things whose value can be captured by advertisers will be inflated when compared to their value in an environment without advertising.
Quite an interesting idea tbh, however if you want to frame it in commodity terms then you should also admit that currently, this very valuable commodity is taken from its owners without their consent. You could compare it to e.g. human labour, maybe: sure, there will always be a market for it, yet we allow labour to be extracted from people only in a heavily regulated framework and don't just let it be taken by force from them. Or property: there is a near infinite demand for physical objects, yet when I own a physical object you nevertheless can't just take it from me. So it should be with our attention.
Is it taken without consent? Don't you consent when you watch YouTube, or use some ad-funded site? Don't you get something (the content) in return?
There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.
It is taken without consent if you leave your house or use public transport, or use certain private sector services that are de facto required to live a normal life.
With that line of thought we'd quickly get into very strange territory. You can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs, even though you might prefer different chairs. Are they now forcing you to use their services without your consent?
You said it yourself - you literally can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs. It's a physical limitation. But it's entirely possible to use public transport without having ads shoved into your face. It's even the default! If people didn't put up ads in/around public transport, you could use public transport without seeing any.
They could simply put the chairs you like into their cars though, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. They just choose not to, much like they choose to put ads in the windows and on the door - for economical reasons.
There's obviously one issue stopping them: there are far more people using public transportation than there are chairs in there, so it's once again physically impossible to accommodate everyones tastes. This is not the case with advertising.
I think the difference here is people don't really know what they're giving up psychologically.
When you're manipulating someone to choose against their best interests, it's happening on an unconscious level and freedom of choice is completely removed from the picture. In these types of cases, no I don't believe there is consent involved.
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, I lost.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.
Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
Is it though? Amazon knows my entire 22 year purchase history and could probably write down a broadly accurate history of my weight, disposable income, mental health, and how busy I was.
And yet it seems that entirely random ads would have a better chance of catching my interest than whatever super smart master mind strategy they are doing after spending thousands of years on that problem.
Amazon knows my entire purchase history too: it's nothing. In have never shopped at Amazon.
Went to an undergraduate library to surf, and low and behold: women's underwear, and I am not a cross dresser. If you do not identify yourself you get the default.
It's almost all "AI" driven. Yes the halcinating kind.
Is that limited to ads? If someone buys a car because it looks sporty and powerful which speaks to his subconscious, was he not manipulated? Was he able to give consent to trade money for that car?
I understand where you're coming from, but psychological manipulation is everywhere and committed by everyone all the time and defining its use as voiding consent seems very problematic.
Yes it is very problematic. Im more concerned about political and sociological manipulation where lies and deceit are used to convince people to support agendas which go against there own best interests.
I'm capable of understanding humanity shares best interests and using lies and deceit to manipulate is harmful to society. It sad you have chosen to believe otherwise. So no I don't agree.
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
> There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place), users with adblock are just trying to minimize their exposure. Totally reasonable (I do it too), but nobody is forcing them.
That may be true for e.g. a malicious software on your computer that force-redirects your regular browsing activity to some evil site, but that's not what we're discussing.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place)
Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.
Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
I'd say the intrusion is similar to you seeing tattoo designs after walking into a tattoo studio - it's expected and accepted, you consent by entering.
I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?), I'd be somewhat concerned of forcing that upon companies (would benefit larger companies by making the barrier to entry higher), but I don't see it causing problems at the same scale of banning all advertising.
> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)
I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.
I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.
Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.
Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.
Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
I think the aggregate is one thing, the other is that it's _much_ simpler dealing with one or 100 advertisers (or a network or three) to monetize than it is dealing with thousands or millions of users, facilitating payments, dealing with charge-backs, storing sensitive data etc. I can start a blog today and slap ads on it, it's easy. Doing the same and having to offer the full option to opt-out for payment is months of work.
Not to mention the interesting question of what happens if you're just starting out and you aren't making FAANG-levels of money yet? Is your content free? Should there be some big pool where this is being paid out of?
Germany has VG-Wort, which is private entity that collectively handles licensing-payments for authors. If you sell a printer, you could potentially print out copyrighted materials with it, so the law demands you to pay them some tiny amount for the possible infraction, and they will distribute it among their members according to the type and reach of their texts. That could work, but it doesn't make things simple.
Then there's things like content-pass which offer this model. They are integrated into the GDPR-consent, and you can pay 2.99 (or so) a month to bypass ads & tracking on sites that use it. I work in affiliation, and everyone I know who uses it only does so because it's a convenient way to enforce consent on GDPR banners because you're technically offering an alternative. If lots of people were to go that route, they'd have to increase the monthly price to make it unattractive. I know one site who built it themselves and set the price to $99/m, and had some stressful evenings when they actually got a person to buy to it, because they didn't consider that someone would. That person is still paying for their content as far as I'm aware.
The media-consumption-increase incentive you mention is definitely a problem - but is it new? I'm not sure. Even if you pay for a magazine which has no ads (I do!), if they are driven by commercial interest (the one I subscribe to isn't really), they'll try to make sure that you're deriving as much value from it as possible so you don't question your subscription - and the best way to ensure that is probably to make sure you read it front to back. At the same time, if you read it front to back, it did give you something, right?
I definitely see the point with Youtube & similar where they might figure out the minimum quality required for you to keep watching and aim barely above it, never really satisfying you, but keeping you entertained just enough so you don't leave. In the end, I think you'd still derive value from it, or you'd quit it - even if that value is small -- an sometimes, someone's life might leave them in a place where mindless distraction is valuable enough to them.
> There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message
Why don't they? If it was a clear way into peoples minds, I'm sure they would. But maybe it's more of a sustainability issue -- if you overdo, you'll turn people away (who wants to go into an inner city where you're screamed at from all sides?), if you underdo it, you're not maximizing your messaging potential. So I'm not sure they can increase it without limit - not to mention that they'd need to pay _a lot_, and there's no guarantee they'd make that money back.
> But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm probably less affected by it than most, because I do use an adblocker, I do use sponsorblock, and I avoid places where ads make economic sense (lots of people to see them). I'm probably still getting some of it, but I'm largely not being targeted because I'm part of very small subset of the population that is weird and there's much more to gain from targeting the rest.
Ultimately, the line between product information (30 years ago the ads in an IT magazine I read were often just price lists of available products; very useful to me, but undoubtedly an ad) and advertisements is very fuzzy. I think you'd have a much easier time regulating away unwanted behaviors in ads like we do for some industries (e.g. pharma, or finance, you can't imply that there's no risk), which doesn't automatically kill the useful bits but can still curtail the unwanted stuff.
Ultimately, limiting screen time for children and others who find themselves unable to control their use is probably more helpful, because most ads today are on screens. Who sees those billboards while staring at the cell phone?
In practical terms there isn't an alternative. Sure there are websites without ads, but they won't tell me about what happens in my community. Sure, I could go to the town hall and watch sessions, but it's not practical.
Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
I hate ads as much as anyone (full disclosure, I use an ad blocker), but with all due respect, the reason there is no “practical” alternative to a service displaying ads is – someone has to pay for it. And before you say “I am paying or I am willing to pay”, it often costs more than you are willing to pay to run these services.
When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.
Of course, but there are other ways to finance the news site. But ads are easy and lucrative, thus nobody (with exceptions) bothers to implement them. It's even worse: I pay for my local newspaper subscription and they still serve tracking ads.
Plutonium is scarce. Demand for that plutonium is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
The black market puts a price on the scarce commodity of plutonium in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest purity plutonium for both the bombed and bomber get used over lower purity plutonium in any given situation (because those are the ones who are winning the nuclear war with said plutonium). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate plutonium to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all weapons at all levels of society.
Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
Plutonium is scarce, but demand for it is even more scarce. Hence why most of the plutonium that exists is untapped. It’s not even a functioning market because of this, it requires governments to prop up its production.
Plutonium is one of the most niche things ever. All humans and businesses desire human attention, whereas virtually nobody desires plutonium.
The amount of people who can do anything with it amounts to likely 0.000001% of the population.
Ugh, the point is that your argument "if there's a market for something there's no point banning it" is special pleading for advertising. If you put other powerful things in there (plutonium, human organs) you quickly see this. But, sure, let's do it the boring way.
> Human attention is scarce.
Compared to what? Do you mean limited, highly desired, or what? Also I'd say there's 8 billion human attentions. That doesn't sound scarce to me.
> Demand for that attention is endless.
"Endless"? Surely not. What if I have it all?
> Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default
Doesn't this mean almost everything we care about is a market? The supply of almost everything (actually everything?) is limited, qed right?
> meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails).
I don't think this means anything. What's an example of using brutal authoritarianism to disrupt other markets?Cocaine? Human organs?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Again if there are any concrete examples I would imagine most people would agree that stuff should be banned.
> Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Wait I thought scarcity + demand poofs a market, how can there be scarcity + demand and no market? Isn't this the foundation of your argument?
> Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes,
The strokes are way too broad. If you're a magazine or a road sign, you're selling the slice of attention you're getting, which isn't anywhere near the whole attention market. Even if you're something like FB or TikTok, you're max getting like 70% of someone's attention. But then is influencer placement more effective than movie product placement? What about an interstitial ad? Blah blah blah. What happens when people are offline, like making breakfast or reading a book (things lots of people still do, believe it or not). This is a market in such a loose sense it loses meaning, but the worst part is the people who own attention aren't getting paid! At least in a human organ market I get cash for my kidneys. Where's the site I can go to where I just watch ads and rack up sweet cheddar?
> and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).
"Value" for who? You've done no work to establish the value of advertising to the audience. Again, less of a market and more of a sheep shearing operation.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
You might be surprised to learn there's a pretty rich diversity of advertising bans. Here in The Hague we ban ads for meat and fossil fuels. Things are still OK!
> Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention
Why should I be allowed to sell my attention any more than I can sell my own kidneys? It's even worse because I let other people sell my attention for me and get nothing back. What point are you trying to make? The market for manipulating my behaviour shouldn't exist at all so I really don't care how efficient it is
> the highest value messages for both the audience..
Obviously not. If this was true then people would pay to see more ads and everyone knows that doesn't happen
> Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Interesting, I perceive it exactly the other way around. I'm surprised this thread is as high up as it is, usually as per my perception, anti-advertisement sentiment gets shot down hard, presumably because a large part of the HN-crowd works for companies like google or facebook which rely on ads as a business model, or start-ups whose products are only used because users were shown ads for them.
My take: The human mind is hackable; it's just too easy and efficient to appeal to our emotions and most basic instincts. And while it was mostly fine to ignore it while it was "only" increasing consumerism, we currently see what happens when the same is applied to elections, with predictably terrible outcomes.
Your stance is still the old HN stance; the market actually works, any change that would impact the status quo is neither welcome nor needed, etc. etc. - this was the gospel for at least a decade, but we're finally awakening to the fact that hey, maybe this is actually bad, even if it made loads of money for many of us. Maybe it led us to the awful situation we're currently in, with big, ad-based monopolies, an absolute clownshow in the highest of offices and CEOs of said monopolies playing the lackeys.
Most big social developments in human history were non-serious and silly to many people before they actually happened.
I don't know if I go that far. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue. And at the same time, I know it would be impossible to do, but I could see that not having advertising would fix a lot of problems in our society. And yes, advertising is a broad term. Maybe we have clear rules around what's advertising and what's propaganda.
There are forms of advertising which are consensual - someone who buys a copy of Vogue presumably does so because they want to see the products being advertised - but the advertising I would ban is that which responds to the demand for attention by flat-out stealing it. If it's not consensual, it should not be legal.
> you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
I'm not usually a fan of brutal authoritarianism, but you're making it sound pretty good.
<< the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
I am willing to give you that there is hatred. I don't know if it is violent, but there is actual hatred. I do not believe it is misguided. As the OP mentions, a lot of people on this site saw how the sausage is made.
<< Human attention is scarce.
True, but each ad makes it even more scarce as humans instinctively try to filter out noise suggesting that ads do not belong in our vicinity.
<< Demand for that attention is endless.
I disagree, but I do not want to pursue this line of argumentation, because it is a deep rabbit hole with a lot that can trip it ( and I sadly do not have time this Sunday ).
<< meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
You may be onto something. Current breed of corporations are effectively nation-states that require focus of an entity nearly as singular. Hmm.
<< no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Meh, I saw the fairness and I think I am ok with its absence from the world at large.
<< generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation
Hardly, "make your penis bigger" likely being most obvious example.
<< please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
I think you are misunderstanding something. The reason OP even considers such a drastic move is because throwing the baby out with the water is easier than attempt at gentle removal. I will add one more thing though. I was in a meeting with non-technical audience yesterday and, oddly, advertising and face tracking in apps came up. This is all starting to trickle down to regular people, which does suggest some level of correction is coming.
<< we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control
It is already out of control, but adtech managed to normalize it.
<< But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
Hardly, maybe you could argue for freedom of association as we are talking mostly third parties, but the business would still be able to huff and puff as much as they want.
> Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
This logic is just bad, plain and simple. You know what else has a high demand? Drugs.
So I guess fuck it, right? Sell heroin in Walmart, who cares. It's a "natural market". Of course people want to shoot up, it feels fucking amazing and humans are hard-wired to do shit that makes them feel good.
So let's just give up and do nothing. Yeah, in fact go ahead and advertise heroin on TVs. Yeah, go ahead and give it to infants too, let's get them young. After all, it's a natural market or something.
Please, I am begging you, stop bending over so severely for "markets". Sit back, and think about consequences.
If something ONLY HARMS PEOPLE, why are we doing it? Seriously, if everyone is a loser then why are we here? We don't have to make life hell just because capitalism would like it! That's a choice!
Economizing is a uniquely human delusion whereby you suddenly think that principles of human centric markets somehow ascend to a primal force of the universe and aren't just a coping mechanism we use to try to peaceably coexist with one another without sinking all our time into killing one another to decrease competition like the rest of the life on the planet.
Nature doesn't do markets. We do. If you apply market thinking to the wrong things, bad things happen. You don't serve the market. The market serves you.
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.