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Comment by _jab | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

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The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.

We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.

The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products.

Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.

>Why YT and Google in general would want

They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads.

Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.

They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.

As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.

There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.

The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.

If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.

Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with.

Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.

If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.

There are still tests and reviews and content where people can show products without being paid by the people producing these products.

Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to reviewers because that gets the product in front of eye-balls just like any other ad. The cost of the free review product is the price of the ad.

It does also happen that people get stuff to review and have to send it back of course.

Sure, but that’s still not free. The company is spending time, money and resources on soliciting the reviews, sending units out, receiving units back and then scrapping or selling those units as refurbs/open box. They’re not spending that money unless they think it’s going to drive sales / awareness. It’s still advertising.

So the company that can afford to send the most stuff to the most reviewers win?

> unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists

Why? If I need something I search for available options and find them e.g. on the producers web presence. Then I buy one or more and review them.

Advertising isn't the general concept of letting people know what products are available for purchase. It's more specifically doing this for money and showing it to people who don't want to see it. One might quibble about exactly what the word "advertising" encompasses, but that description covers the bad stuff pretty well, whatever name you want to give it.

I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?

A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.

A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.

But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.

That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.

> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.

So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?

There's a spectrum. Movie trailers are closer to the "not ads" portion of the spectrum, although when shown in theaters they are much more ad-like than when made available online.

There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.

In the end it doesn't really matter. That's under 0.1% of TV viewing and it's a unique situation. Yes edge cases exist, edge cases always exist, but that's a very tiny one.

If a definition can be changed in a way that makes it both simpler and removes an edge case, I think that is often (but not always) a sign that the change may be a good one.

(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)

I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.

Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.

Definitions aren't that important. What's important is figuring out what contributes to society and what ends up just looting our attention.

A good (but not perfect) guideline is that voluntary transactions are beneficial to both parties because otherwise they wouldn't participate, and transactions where one party doesn't actively agree to it are often bad because the other party has no incentive to make it otherwise.

That's why I focused on whether the viewer actually wants it. If I seek it out, then it's useful or at least entertaining. If I don't, then it's probably a net negative for me.

I agree that that the criteria you gave is probably more relevant for the issue at hand, sure.

And, while definitions may not be super important (as you say), and while it is often fine to redefine a word within some context, I do think the definition I gave is probably closer to how people usually use the word “advertisement”.

My inclination is to stick on an adjective though, and refer to, say, “unwanted ads”, rather than say that the ads in a classified section “aren’t ads”.

I haven't really, most of the products I've bought after advertising were low quality.

I do have some very high quality products that were recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so good.

How does the first person find the product to recommend it, though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without being recommended by a previous customer.

I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements. The invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow downfall in ads.

I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.

I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A very good and short read that I find continually relevant applying the same ideas to social media.

Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one who finally got me to :)

> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements.

I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card

I'm not an expert, but looking at those articles, most of the illustrated and colour designs seem to have become popular in the 19th century, though I do see a few illstrated examples from the 18th century as well.

This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.

I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer, and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more established photographers would absolutely dominate my little rural market even when their photography was worse.

Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.

If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area] that’s hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and pricing info, great! Yes, please!

I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.

Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you don't pay up for the features.

Right, and in this new ad-free world, those things works not be allowed, and all businesses would be on a level playing field, with none privileged over the others simply because they have a larger advertising budget.

I own ten thousand businesses, all of whom employ me as a contractor. All businesses being on a level playing field puts me at quite an advantage!

If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.

There's no such thing as a level playing field... you think EVERY brand can fit on store shelves for discovery?

This is entirely a human construct, we can absolutely make it a level playing field if we collectively choose so.

What a sad comment.

Until you try to grapple with real world problems like limited shelf space, limited directory space, how the ads (ahem sorry, directory entries) should be sorted, how to deal with setting boundaries around local directories, etc.

Good thing there is no fundamental law of the universe forcing merchants to stock every single good ever invented.

Without advertising (or marketing of some kind), how do you propose for any new product to EVER reach a store shelf.

You convince the store owner in person, this was kinda the case throughout all of humanity until very recently.

It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers.

They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology?

Once again, what is the benefit for society here?

But that's marketing/advertising/sales... as would be printing catalogs that the seller pays for.

You can make it more level, but in any system constrained by the physical world, you can never make it completely level.

Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling.

There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf.

Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products.

But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage.

Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory.

But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved?

Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such and such street is, well, an ad.

Directories aren’t ads. The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford. Like in a phonebook.

Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited.

> The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford

You see the contradiction.

You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.)

I see no contradiction. Google or Meta ads are not a catalog. They are imposed on people who didn’t decide to browse a catalog, and also you can’t browse all Google/Meta ads as a catalog. A catalog listing products or businesses doesn’t constitute ads, just as a phonebook doesn’t.

I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws:

1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.

2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.

> No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it

How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?

> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime

Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?

> A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved

This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?

> How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?

You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.

> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?

Only if they were paid to do so.

> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?

Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.

I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".

Fixed fee highly favors big players. Not even sure why you want fixed fee. Either remove fee at all or charge higher for bigger players or charge based on sale rather than listing.

By the same I mean equal non-discriminatory pricing - not necessarily "fixed" rather than "by sale" or "by view" or what have you but that if it's "by view" then it's "x cents per view" with the same x everyone and if it's "3% of referred sale revenue" it's that for everyone.

The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder.

> Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.

If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50 people and then the money runs out.

That's completely different from getting onto a phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can see my company's offer.

I think they’ve made the difference pretty clear?

Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle.

What does "defunding the difference" mean? layer8 and phantasmish absolutely said what the difference was.

companies have to pay to get their products on shelve in many grocery stores

Who is maintaining and paying for this directory?

Those who are interested in knowing what services exist.

It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites!

The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth. Yahoo was a directory before it was a "search engine". AOL was a curated walled garden. Web rings were a thing, great for playful discovery, terrible for finding a specific thing. Heck for that matter, web ring banners are arguably just interactive "banners ads".

Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters.

> The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth.

Weren't those better before ads got involved?

> Web rings were a thing

Aren't those literally word of mouth?

> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.

That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.

> Weren't those better before ads got involved?

The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name.

> Aren't those literally word of mouth?

Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022175643/http://www10.yaho...

They won't. Notice that Angies list doesn't operate on the "customer pays for the list" model. That's because any directory service that depends on the searcher paying suffers from the problem that once you've found what you're looking for, you have no reason to keep paying for the directory. If I need a lawn guy, I only need to find one, and then I have their number. Why am I going to keep paying the "Lawn Guy Directory" $5 a month after I found someone?

And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back.

Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer.

And who puts together this magic directory, without pay?

If I need a photographer, I'm going to go and search for one. If no one is allowed to advertise to me, then both the small and large players in the space are on an even playing field. Your photography website or Facebook page will be just as searchable or indexable as before, as will business directory sites that can help people find services they need, along with reviews and testimonials.

Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.

Capitalism always hides behind the petty business owner/store owner/craftsman. Then the haute bourgeoisie takes the bulk of the profits.

Maybe every advanced social system has a propensity towards totalitarianism. Similar criticisms can easily be foisted on feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, anarchism, etc. I think in Western Liberal Capitalism there's still space for a middle class. More, it appears the peculiar features of this system have enabled it to unlock tremendous social vigor and provide for the People historic material wealth. Perhaps what's missing in this system isn't material...

I’m at a loss as to what these abstract to the heavens responses even mean to reply to. What I commented on was the propaganda tactics of capitalism. The topic in itself wasn’t even about the merits of it (but see the last sentence). What you get in response though are these chin-stroking platitudes about but maybe all social systems have their faults, and ah but look at how full and bountiful my fridge is because of this social system.

Cadre, I can't help you. If the guy says meta advertising works for him, I'd take his word for it.

Nobody is immune to propaganda.

Back then you'd have physical bulletin boards where you could either freely pin your handwritten note/"ad" onto or you'd have someone do it for you. Still technically an ad though.

It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.

I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.

Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in practice?

Impossible to solve I’m sure. Probably lower priority than stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to make businesses do or not do things.

By making it illegal? Brands can still compete on price and quality.

Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This isn’t a good outcome. I also question if the shelves would even changes much. They will probably prioritize their high margin products, which doesn’t sound any better.

Where does the money to pay for shelf space come from if not the money we pay for food?

In theory, sure. In practice, the food makers aren’t going to lower their prices to the stores, they will just stop paying the shelf fees.

What’s the legal way to arrange things on a shelf?

So instead of buying ad space we can now buy catalog space and reinvent the wheel.

The principle would be that companies aren’t allow to buy placement. It would be like a phonebook.

Yes, instead they register 1 million businesses that will all be listed in the phonebook.

That would require regulation, as a catalog maker isn’t going to turn down what is effectively free money. This also doesn’t translate well to a physical store with more constraints on space.

I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).

How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors incumbents or spammers depending on direction.

Which company is on page 1?

There are no successful economies without ads.

Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies.

There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.

Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.

But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.

This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.

It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.

And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.

> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around

Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.

I don't think very many people in this thread actually mean markets when they say that. Sounds like they might mean corporate controlled markets? Otherwise the comments are gibberish. Markets are just a group of people exchanging time and resources. Wanting that to go away is... Bizarre and nonsensical.

Advertising exists in some form even in ancient barter economies. It is older than currency.

Alas, well-regulated market economies are the least-worst option we have.

Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a "necessary evil." It certainly is not.

Not only did I not say that, but I also agree with you completely.

I understand what you mean, but I would modify this statement a bit:

There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.

There is not any real-world economy that has implemented that information exchange in the absence of activities that would be accurately described as advertising.

Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.

There are no successful economies without blue paint, either. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.

And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.

> There are no successful economies without blue paint

I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.

> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.

I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.

I mean even vaguely vaguely modern-style economy. And you know that's not the point. The point is there's a lot of things that are omnipresent but also not important to the economy.

> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.

That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.

And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.

All that can be regulated though. In many jurisdictions, it's forbidden for lawyers or pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products with it being regulated what counts as an advertisement and putting oneself into the phone book or putting a big sign with “Lawyer” on one's practice is allowed but putting oneself into a magazine or on television is not.

And it should be.

Isn’t the catalog an ad?

The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.

A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?

Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?

That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.

For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?

Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.

It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.

ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference

Yes, the store has a catalog. They want you to see the catalog, so they pay someone to tell you that the catalog exists.

Catalogs are ads.

I don’t think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are choosing to pretend the ads you don’t mind aren’t ads at all.

You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.

And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.

So stores are just one form of ads then, let’s ban stores too while we’re at it.

> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.

If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.

How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?

Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.

I’ve yet to see a single product that isn’t related to domains existing products solve problems for. That is, I’m aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged suddenly.

So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.

New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.

Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.

> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.

> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!”

So, place an ad in other words.

It’s not an ad if you’re not paying someone to forcibly show it to other people.

So if I put up posters in my neighborhood for my PC fixing service, it's not considered ads, but if I pay someone else to put the same posters up, they're suddenly ads?

what if I payed a content marketing expert to craft my blog post and title in such a way that drew attention? Would that be paying for

My man that’s an ad

Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK

Not everyone lives close to stores.

Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.

I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.

Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."

Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.

Magazines and phone books are often largely ad-supported. They largely wouldn't exist without some amount of advertising.

Mmmmmno?

Go to any bookstore and open practically any paid magazine. Count how many pages are ads. It's far from a small percentage. Some I've looked at recently were practically 1/3 to 1/2 ads. This isn't far from how things were decades ago.

Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!

Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.

But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?

> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?

I have never in my several decades of life seen and ad for anything and thought "I need to get that".

I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for Action Man™ during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit this response from kids, and that I should always think critically about the messaging in ads.

Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads? Housing ads?

I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.

Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.

It would be interesting to be able to define if an advertisement is still an advertisement in the sense the OP was referring if it is something sought out.

I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the 99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me online and in public.

It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but they at least meet two different types of advert to me, personally.

I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I actually quite often blacklist brands and products for aggressively marketing to me.

I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had previously purchased identical products with their own money.

Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.

If you waited for an ad to solve your "legitimate problem" you didn't have a problem to begin with imho

You might not know it is a problem and that it is solvable.

Yes but the amount of that happening is nowhere near enough to justify the ad-world we are living in.

Why would I care then? If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem. Electricity, a car, a fridge, &c. solve legitimate problems. 99% of things being advertised today create the problem they solve and trick you into thinking you really need to solve this problem in your life

> If people lived until now without it it can't be that big of a problem

That’s a very weak argument that can justify anything. Why do you need electricity, a car, a fridge? There have been people living without these for thousands of years. Of course there are bad ads and useless products (probably 99% of them), but not all ads are useless.

No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.

It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.

The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...

But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.

If the implication is that the ad industry helps to address the problem of buyers having imperfect information, that couldn't be more wrong.

The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even remotely interested in informing, it's interested in propagandizing.

Obviously a gigantic industry has more than a singular impact on society. I only mentioned the one impact above because that was specifically the topic of discussion.

There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.

> No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.

This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of cases really. I never in my life bought something because I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a solution online or talking to people about it

Absolutely! But, you're missing the cognitive part of this. People don't search for things that they don't think exists.

Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two different things.

I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.

This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.

Man if hiccups are a "legitimate problem" then indeed we are fucked... let's pollute everything irl and on the web with ads to solve these "problems"... where do we draw the line ? Because it sounds like we'll have an infinite amount of problems and we certainly don't have an infinite amount of resources

btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution" online and hiccaway is on the front page.

Humans are wired to have problems. If all your basic problems are solved (shelter, food, etc), you will start inventing problems. This finding and solving of problems has led to all the development in human society, for better or worse.

It has been this finding and solving of problems that led to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as well, for better or worse again.

I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up. That’s why I think this is a decent example. Adults aren’t actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave up long ago, and most of the time, it isn’t something they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck. Depending on when they happen, like before a big presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend to overlook it, because they know there isn’t a real cure.

I’m not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of creating awareness of new things that are actually useful. Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just keep a product you already know about in the front of your mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is for a way to surface that 5%.

The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's opt-in.

Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.

But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that show you ads.

Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.

Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.

Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient, especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad tech is definitely this).

Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.

There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.

Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.

Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.

Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.

The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.

And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.

Ads should be centralised state department and run through only approved and regulated bodies at regulated sites.

As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed

Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees.

Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.

Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another?

I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.

>Is there not always some sort "marketplace"

How exactly does that work for virtual products?

If they provide value, people will seek them out.

How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.

Just one counter example: gh.de

Not really a counter example: gh.de is a pure advertising platform.

If I need something, I’ll find it.

How did people that had something to sell do it before advertising?

The problem again is greed. The organic way is too inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make people rich instead of letting the product do the convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.

Advertising is as old as humanity itself. Asking what people did before advertising doesn't make sense.

Also, word-of-mouth advertising is, as the name suggests, a form of advertising.

Not that I ever use it but there are apparently services like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt people use to seek out new products.

But as sibling comment said, if it's really good, people will find it eventually.

Funny you mention Product Hunt because it's pay-to-play too, there was a whole controversy a decade ago exactly now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

Catalogs - offline and on-line, commercial and government. Deprived of constant noise and overstimulation of advertising, people will actively seek such information out, whether because they have a problem to solve, or just out of curiosity. All we're talking about here is switching from current "push" model of advertising back to "pull" model.

Who here never browsed a product or company catalog they found, just because they were curious?

I can almost feel the calm just imagining the world you're describing.

That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.

Oh I agree. I don’t want or need to see ads, I currently do though.

Yes, and if you ban ads then you can expect a lot more underhand marketing as the companies peddling their goods will try and find another way to reach you.

How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.

Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

> Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

examples?

- Paying for product placement on store shelves and movies

- SEO optimization to get to the top of the search result page

- Paying influencers to use their product

- Paying people to post on forums about the product

- Sending / sponsoring reviewers

Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.

Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.

But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.

Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.

Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.

Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.

As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.

Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works.

Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but

- TV was twice the cost

- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription

- All news was paywalled

- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist

- etc etc

Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.

At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.

Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.

I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.

When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.

> When we used to pay for newspapers

Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.

Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.

Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.

So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.

Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.

I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.

As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.

>The world would definitely be better without ads.

I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.

Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.

Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.

Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?

The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....

Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.

However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.

If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.

That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium.

You guys did not read past the first sentence?

Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.

ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech

Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.

You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.

People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

When did we have a functioning economy without ads? Was it the 1980's when some of the most classic children's shows were 30 minute commercials for toys? Was it the 1960s when Charles Schultz was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas in the Charlier Brown special? Maybe the 1910's when Uncle Sam famously wanted you to join the army? Was it the 1890's when Montgomery Ward and Sears were sending out mail order catalogs? Was it the 1860's when you could learn that "The Best Glass of Ale In the Globe" was available at Isabella Nesbitt's Inn[1]? Town criers and traveling medicine shows date back to at least the 1700's.

Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it.

[1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...

They said "ad companies" not the entire concept of ads.

What is an "ad company" though? If it's someone you pay to advertise your product for you, well that's something town criers often did for merchants so "ad companies" are at least that old.

I don't know exactly what definition they meant, but I'm confident that a crier doesn't count as an ad company.

Geez, if you think people don't like banner ads or billboards, you should see what they think of town criers.

Criers are expensive. And I'd say that mattress shop guy qualifies and he doesn't bother me that much.

I would happily take a deal that gets rid of all tv and video ads and replaces them with as many independent criers as companies are willing to pay.

I will note we effectively have that law already for political text spam. No robo-texting it has to come from a “real” person. Doesn’t seem to have changed the amount of text spam I get, they just all start with “This is Bob from People Against Things …”

You could probably hire a lot of “town criers” on fiver for the cost of a 30 second TV spot.

When I say I would accept town criers to get rid of those ads I mean literal town criers. Not people sending me mail, email, texts, or calls. People being kinda loud and/or holding up big signs in public places. They can offer me a flyer when I walk by, I suppose.

Sure I get it. I just don't think your annoyance level is going to go down that much. It wont take many sign twirlers on every corner, or people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck" to be more annoying than the worst of youtube's advertising. Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses. Door to door salesmen are less prevalent because other forms of advertising are cheaper, but if you can't do those other forms of advertising, door to door becomes economically competitive again. I'm pretty sure a "town criers only" world would be significantly more grating and annoying than you think. Imagine "liberty tax" sign holders during tax season, but all the businesses and all the time.

> people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck"

I doubt that would be an efficient use of money, and that doesn't really seem like crier behavior.

And is that kind of noisemaking legal in most places?

If I need to specify the criers only use their own voice, then consider that specified.

> Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses

Blocking that double use is part of why I tossed "independent" into my earlier post.

And door to door salesmen coming onto my property definitely don't count as criers.

> I doubt that would be an efficient use of money

It works for ice cream trucks, and when you ban all other forms of advertising, it's not like there's any more efficient places to spend that ad money.

> Blocking that double use is part of why I tossed "independent" into my earlier post.

So we'd just wind up with fleets of "independent contractors" doing deliveries for part of their income and advertising for the other part. It's not like a bunch of those vans and trucks aren't already contractors in the first place.

It is what enables global commerce.

>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.

This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.

Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).

Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.

>All ads are poisonous

This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.

Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.

How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?

If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?

Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.

I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.

just get a list of shops and compare their prices instead of waiting for an ad popping up in front of you for each product you buy when you actually would prefer to watch something else?

The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM.

There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.

The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.

edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.

Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.

> All ads are poisonous.

Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.

Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.

Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.

Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.

I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.

Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.

It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.

The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.

While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.

The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.

I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".

I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.

My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...

That's a great idea for a dystopian sci-fi story: you can opt out of ads, but your product choices are publicly broadcast instead.

Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind

To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.

So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?

Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?

Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?

To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well

Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there

I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.

Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.

There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.

If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.

And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.

So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...

I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.

The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)

I feel like someone must have built this though

Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.

And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.

> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system.

Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.

I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.

For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.

I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.

The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.

> The main issue is how you discover a new product.

We live in the information age.

How did you learn about your programming languages? Ads?

I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).

Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.

I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...

One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.

Ok, but do you agree that we should put ads in designated places (and out of sight, generally) where people can look them up whenever they find it convenient rather than the other way around where companies just shove them in your face at random times?

Open source software (mostly) don’t have ads, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If anything, it exemplifies that ads aren’t required.

> I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.

How would people learn about various choices?

> How would people learn about various choices?

By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.

AND most importantly, the user would view the information when THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to shove it in their face.

> By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

Who pays for the website? In the end, a world without ads gets very pricey very quickly.

Millions of ad haters would gladly pay for the website!

But seriously, you think there is no money in a website for showing ads?

who paid for product catalogues in the past? who gives free samples to journalists for testing?

People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.

What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.

>Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search?

At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.

Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.

Yeah but people also get addicted to things like cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes people need a little help to avoid harmful things.

I am often frustrated by ads/sponsored content on YouTube that I cannot buy. Youtuber present me nice product targeted for US audience. I am in Europe. No way I can use it or buy it. I would do it sometimes, but I cannot. Still I have to watch such ads.

I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.

That's the funny part, ads would be less annoying if they were hyper-targeted, which means there was more supply of ads and worse privacy. There's been a number of times I've found useful stuff from ads, but it's rare and almost never on Youtube.

Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.

When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.

Ignoring the cryptocurrency angle for a second (to avoid distracting knee-jerks)...

Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?

All transactions include several kinds of costs. Reducing the monetary costs to zero does nothing for the other costs.

Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".

ads

Yes. And AML/KYC. Advertisements don't bear the burden of AML/KYC, but micropayments do.

AML/KYC costs money, enough to make truly micro micropayments impossible.

> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads

You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.

Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.

I haven’t given it enough thought, but would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.

> would a ban on selling ad space do the trick?

How would you define ad space?

> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service

An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)

If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.

Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space.

Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.

Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

> would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.

In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).

I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.

Can you explain what features you're talking about? Do you mean stuff like "shorts"?

The video feed, notifications, and the whole UI are still structured to maximize engagement, instead of giving paying users better control.

Autoplay keeps turning itself back on. I’ve probably turned it off a dozen times now.

The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too.

The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts.

Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.

It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam.

The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations.

I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are.

I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.

ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.

How would that work? The email address generally has the ISP's domain name in it.

Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.

> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.

Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.

Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.

Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.

We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.

Because we are spending our resources on stupid shit like tiktok virals funded by ads.

A pie that includes sand which is now turned into GPUs that can solve complex problems described in English. Value that was unlocked fairly recently from “one pie”.

Tell me, is the deployment of that famous talking sand at all resource-constrained?

Of course: Everything is resource-constrained. That’s why it’s called economics.

The question was whether the “pie”—total economic output—has a meaningful upper bound on growth because we only have a whole planet full of resources to exploit as our minds and capabilities allow.

The answer is no, and history bears that out.

If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.

> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it

If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them

Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please

>The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't

They don’t necessarily make more money from every user though.

I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd rather that people living under the poverty threshold get subsidised directly

Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet

I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or product that includes advertising as part of buying the third party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the service or product then you're down to off-brand products that don't run ads

Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing

Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)

There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally binding (invoices, etc.)

It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down

You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.

And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.

People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.

or micro payments or something different which will work better.

Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...

People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.

No I won't pay for premium because even if I pay for it I still get ads in the content itself.

Fix that and then I'll pay.

Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.

YT makes it easy to skip embedded ads now. They mark places where people skip past and shortcut it so you don't need to watch them.

Sponsorblock exists as well.

Sponsorblock is great but only works in the browser. Most people view YT on other devices.

Revanced Youtube's app support sponsorblock as well.

Yes and Tubular and SmartTubeNext (Android TV!) and Grayjay too. Many options

Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to be forked.

so you just dont think people making video content should make money in any way? if you hate ads that much dont watch any creators that have sponsored content. oh wait, the only way they can make videos that good is because they make money and are professionals. doh!

No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators to sneak some in anyway.

And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.

What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.

ok so you actually dont think they should be single dipping because you use ublock origin and sponsorblock?

No but if they weren't double dipping with the sponsors I'd pay for premium.

It's just that as it stands it makes no sense to do so. I still get ads so there's nothing in it for me. And if I use sponsorblock I might as well go the full way.

It's really on YouTube that they have let this situation be created. They should have stopped sponsor segments the moment they arrived.

I don't like ads either. Who does? I really don't mind unless they are hard-cut and aren't made by the creator themselves. What's your solution here? A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.

They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.

There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.

How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).

Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.

Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.

I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.

Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]

Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements

they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later

Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.

Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.

And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.

A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719

However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.

You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE

This makes me wonder how the system makes any money. Presumably the same people that won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube won't buy things from ads either. So how do the ad companies make any money on them?

They will actually. Youtube premium has had explosive growth after YT started pushing more ads and blocking ad blockers. People pay for streaming services quite regularly. And youtube has one of the strongest platforms/content bases to sell a subscription.

Youtube is more like modern Cable TV though, there's huge value there for the price. I like visiting Twitter and Reddit occasionally for news, I've been using both since they launched, but I wouldn't pay for either of those. I could easily make the choice to cut that out of my life.

There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.

For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.

I was just in the Philippines, tons of ads for Japanese motorcycle brands. In places where competition and usage for the product or service is high, there will be ads, and lots of it. You use motorcycles as an example, but it probably isn't a very good example.

I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.

I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!

YouTube has been increasing both the amount, frequency and length of ads in their video's for a long time now. They know people will keep using them anyway because of the network effect, and people who are really fed up with these ads will buy premium anyway. For them it's a win/win.

It's a decent deal.

Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.

I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.

Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.

Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.

If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.

Don't pretend that its just YouTube forcing the ads on you. The creators can choose where ads go in their videos.

The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Yet, most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.

And with 'Native ads' it's nearly impossible to have ad-free experience nowadays.

SponsorBlock works very well for skipping in-video ads.

>most content on YouTube these days are sponsored by the companies trying to sell you a crap.

Because YT doesn't pay shit to content creators, hence being part of creating this.

The people making the content need to make a living too, as much as ads suck.

At least on youtube premium it has a feature to "Skip commonly skipped section".

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Billboard ads are banned in cities in New Zealand. Have been for a long time

It'd be great if all public ads were banned and digital ads were the only form. That way those who are savvy enough can also block the digital ones and live a completely ad-free life.

My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.

> whether the world would be better without ads

What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)

1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.

If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name

> If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name

These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.

I can see how it's contradictory on its face, but the reality is pretty nuanced.

Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve...

However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.

That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.

If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.

"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"

This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.

If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.

> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.

How did everyone know about irobot's offering?

What if in the stores, botvacs and irobots were presented right next to each other with the same amount of real estate?

First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth, early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else is just a fake imitation.

Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?

And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.

Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.

“Users” are the only people who matter. Companies are artificial constructs and, in an ideal world, would never be prioritized over the public.

If I search for "Salesforce alternative" and something that isn't Salesforce shows up, great! That's what I want!

If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.

This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.

And if I am not searching for Salesforce or alternatives, and an ad for Salesforce or an alternative gets pushed into my face, the ad is wrong and the advertiser is wrong.

It's infuriating, the other day I had to download an app to pay for parking. What the fuck do I need the top choice to be a competing parking app? That won't do me any good when the place I'm parking need the one I searched for and who the hell goes "oh, an exciting new parking app? I'm gonna drive around until I can find a place that uses it so I can park there!"

>Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game

Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.

They kinda created this fake locked down market that people expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say, just downloading apps normally like on a computer.

Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol

I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.

> For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.

Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.

In reality, even if I provide a better product than Salesforce, they will outcompete me by their ad-buying power.

A big part of advertising on Google is making sure your own brand is the top result. This is essentially extortion from Google. Companies are burning money on something that should be the default result in Google.

The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.

I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.

There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy

I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.

I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.

Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.

Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.

the fundamental problem is capitalism

When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,

I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.

[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...

You're forgetting a very important problem: hard to implement. Sugar in drinks and CO2 emissions are easily measured. The definition of what's an ad is much harder.

>what's an ad is much harder.

Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.

He talks about a Pigovian tax for ads, which is interesting. I don’t have any thoughts other than “yeah good idea.”

But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.

Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…

Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.

In Thailand signs are taxed based on its size, text language (Thai only, No text or multilingual text and Thai text are placed lower than other languages, Multilingual text), and static/dynamic (I assume this applies to both digital and trivision).

This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.

Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.

No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.

And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.

My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.

people still would buy food in their favorite shops, so they probably will survive - perhaps even with higher profits as zero-sum ad spending is gone

It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"

Without adverts, the platform has less incentive to maximise engagement. They won't send you push notifications, they won't implement short form video, etc. My gym/ISP/email provider don't design their services on making me spend the whole day using them. If anything they don't want me using the service at all but I myself want to.

As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.

I'm imagining a world where ads on screens generate enough revenue to mean that rail and bus services are free. It would be annoying, but free public transport would also reduce car volumes improving transport for all.

It's unlikely ads would ever actually fund any meaningful real world product or service like public transport. The most they can fund is some crappy apps, websites and digital platforms, and most of the time they can barely do that.

It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.

A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.

I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.

It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.

> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads.

Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time.

Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!

I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.

For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.

I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?

Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.

Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.

Of course it would be better.

Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.

> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?

New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.

How about a world without money?

It would be much, much better:

- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.

- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.

- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.

- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.

- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".

- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.

- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.

- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.

- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.

- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.

- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.

- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.

- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.

- People get back some part of their attention span.

The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!

Ads are a plague on our societies.

Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.

I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.

Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things:

- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads.

- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.

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