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.
Advertising is how small and new companies can reach customers. It's how monopolies are broken. It's how progress reaches the masses.
Yes, it is willfully intended to change people's behavior. So are many of our posts on HN. That is an important purpose for communication!
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.
The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.
I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.
Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.
It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.
Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.
You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.
You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.
Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.
There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.
When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.
We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.
What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
My iPhone doesn't have any ads by default outside of the app store.
You're imagining a complete restricting of society and you're not even willing to do without a few apps and Instagram.
If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.
> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.
The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.
The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.
My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.
.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.
But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?
Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?
Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?