zlacker

>>iambat+(OP)
Advertising is a parasitic force on society. It sucks up your attention with a willful intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.

If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.

They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.

Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.

>>Taek+F1
There are definitely a lot of problems with advertising and I am all for regulating them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for smaller organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) without some form of advertising people just would not hear about us at all.

>>morsec+V3
If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.

Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.

And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.

>>Taek+o4
> convince someone with an audience to feature you without paying them to do it.

It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?

I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:

- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before

- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.

- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.

- Only local businesses can survive.

They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.

-- While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?