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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that we’re reading these comments willingly. A great deal of advertising is imposed on people who don’t want it.

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?

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Yes? Unfortunately others can communicate to us without our consent. That could be ads or someone writing you a postcard, or yelling on a street corner. All of those can influence us and not all of them are welcome but I don’t think it’s reasonable to think we can live in a world where we can fully control it without becoming hermits.

But one way we can control some of it is by banning advertising

I’m curious how you’d define advertising. Is it just something applied to another form of media? Would you count an end cap at the super market? Does the McDonald’s logo on the big sign you can see from the highway count? Or the coke machine inside?

Any definition I could pick would be more than none, which us what we have now.

An easy start is all billboards, everything ublock origin considers an ad, TV/radio/magazine ones.

All very unambiguous

Maybe not, but only because it’s impractical, not because advertising is actually a good thing.

And plenty of times a lot can be done to mitigate those, not being able to fix every chance, doesn't mean we should'nt try to fix what we can

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

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