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!
As for all communication being a bit like advertising, a significant threshold has been crossed once you're paying to have your information elevated above that of your peers. If we didn't allow that, the noise floor would be lower, and it would be possible to achieve the benefits of advertising without the harms.
For instance, suppose I'm looking for a plumber... there are only maybe fifteen within a reasonable distance. There's no need for the plumbers to pay some third party for the privilege of being first in the list. I can limit my search criteria so that the results are narrow enough that I can consider each one, and they can instead spend that money on pipes or toilets or whatever.
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.
And that makes all the difference. I am very happy to read that an HN commenter prefers one specific brand of car - assuming that this is an unbiased comment and the commenter was not paid to say that. On the other hand, if they *were* paid to say they like a specific brand of car, they are deceiving me! They are exposing my brain to ideas and associations that are inauthentic, and making me more likely to buy a certain brand of car even though that car cannot get mentioned on its own merits, and instead needs to pay for attention.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that "advertising is how monopolies are broken" - my read on the advertising industry is that larger companies today have a massive advantage over smaller companies, and that smaller businesses would be more able to succeed if advertising was removed. And the advantage more or less comes from the larger brands ability to afford to expose a larger number of people, and that exposure has superlinear effects on purchase behavior (because not only are you exposed to it, but your friends are talking about it, and their family is talking about it, etc).
Some ads are abusive. Some ads compel behavior that is obviously bad for the participants.
Take all the sports gambling ads right now.
Take loot boxes with flashing visuals for children.
Some ads are fine. They are informative and useful, and can provide value.
I'm my opinion, we have leaned too far towards the bad. The useful is being drowned out by ads that take advantage of any social or emotional vulnerability we have. Banking on physical rewards systems geared towards smaller, more meaningful social groups to make us give up attention, time, and money.
I'm in favor of banning ads. Let's try the other end of the spectrum for a bit.
To be crass: let God find his own in the ads world. The good products will still spread organically. It's still advertising. It's just not the bullshit we have today.
I’m really not concerned about the car I don’t have, the quality of my floor mop, or the latest prescription pharmaceutical that my primary care doctor is too stupid to even spell.
I really feel for the small companies. But outside extremely industry specific mediums, they just can’t afford to advertise much. They have to be known from reputation and search engine results.
So, while I see the point you are trying to make, by volume, the bulk of advertising is utter crap.
If I don’t want my behavior swayed by HN, I can stop reading it. If I don’t want my behavior swayed by advertising, I can... close my eyes every time a bus goes by, avoid any public place with an operating television, and never check my mail?
The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.
For a concrete example:
I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.
Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.
My feed on social apps and youtube is very frequently filled with small businesses near me.
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.
Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.
Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.
To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
Search engines are useful things. They can still exist on a world without ads.
It's true that people often spend their money on frivolous or unnecessary things. But sometimes people pay for useful things too!
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.
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
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.
There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.
The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.
We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to
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.
An easy start is all billboards, everything ublock origin considers an ad, TV/radio/magazine ones.
All very unambiguous
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?
The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.
I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.
Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.
> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?
The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.
You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.
If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?
Germany has a ban on coldcalling, Sao Paulo on outdoors advertising, Chile on Mascots / Kid Targeted Branding on Cereals
We can expand on those, I won't say neccessarily kill all advetisement, but we could certainly do a lot better than the current climate
But - also - my wife and I opened a restaurant recently. We need exposure. We are buying ad space on social media, having influencers review the place, working on putting up fliers at public bulletin boards, and investigating mailers (snail mail). It's clear, we're not going to make a go of it without connecting with more customers. If it was just me and her working it, we'd be in the green but we have day jobs and pay our (necessary) employees fairly.