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Comment by eldenring | Hacker News Reader

So what do you do if you have a better product and a "name brand" disadvantage? Advertising commodifies information flow instead of letting it pool with the people who already have access to it. Think of all the products that got big nowadays because they could convince VCs to fund ad spend, and saw a return for it.

I think advertising has a huge, positive, 2nd order effect on the world.

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Entire advertising industry could be replaced by one database of products and services at a fraction of the cost to the consumer.

Please expound. Are we going to fill in yearly surveys explaining what we like and don't like? Where does the information come from? Who determines the algorithm for placement? Will there now be no way to opt-out of ads at all, there's now a national quota on how many ads were exposed to a year or something?

There's no algorithm. Just a query language. Nothing is pushed to consumer. You want to buy something. You search. Companies can't pay anyone for any kind of publishing. Anyone is free to build tools and content that helps with the search. However companies can publish information about their products and services only through the database.

lol you don’t understand people

I think you have trouble understanding. People happily use similar things already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_shopping_website

> However companies can publish information about their products and services only through the database.

Since we're already dreaming, I'd modify this to say companies can publish information about their products and services only on their own website, and the database just links to it.

I wouldn't go that route just in case companies has incentive to obfuscate the information. Forcing them to publish through the database makes them confirm their information to one structure so consumers have easier time searching comparing and deciding. I'd also make publishing of some information mandatory before you can sell to customers.

I didn't mean my suggestion to imply that the DB would be barren of information and you'd have to go to multiple websites to compare products. However, I think the information in the DB, even if provided by the company, should be vetted and inputted by a neutral party, since the company has an incentive to manipulate or bias it.

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