> Why don't we just ban advertising?

Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.

Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.

>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

So be it.

>Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.

>Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.

Lots of speculation here, as if word of mouth didn't exist. Why is it so necessary that a brand tells me to buy things? Don't people have other ways to reach out to their audience that doesn't invade literally every public sphere, from billboards to websites?

>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run.

Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value of their content to their audience.

It also means that people would have a lot less access to information about what's going on. I wouldn't subscribe to a single newspaper or magazine if it cost me money. I would guess that a lot of the people I know would do the same.

Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time instead.

We're already saturated with information. Even if 99% less filtered through paywalls that'd be more than enough to satiate anyone's needs.

It would be interesting to study the content creators with the highest patreon revenue and see what kind of content they're creating. Is it Outrage of the Day echo chamber content, how to DIY, storytelling, or something else. That might give us some insight into what a advertising free content creation world would look like.

Seems to me just as likely we'd get a third option: Free journalism paid for by the super-rich and large corporations.

If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.

> Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you.

Umm, I think this is largely the reality for niche products right now, with advertising. I don't see ads for niche products, and I don't see producers of niche products paying for ads because a small campaign wouldn't reach the right audience and a large campaign would be too expensive for a niche product.

This is exactly the problem that highly targeted advertising solves. I see ads for relatively niche products fairly often.

YMMV. I don't recall seeing anything remotely relevant, so maybe it's not a working solution.

That would only lead to more and more websites asking for payment info, so no thanks. I'd rather have ads that I can block or just tolerate than completely close off the web a part from some niche, personal websites. Ad tracking is nothing compared to having my real life identity linked to me everywhere on the web, and possibly get locked off most of it if they decide to ban me at some point.

"The good old days" where the internet was mostly ad free (a very short amount of time after becoming mainstream) was nothing like the internet we have now. It was small, amateur websites that were akin to blogs. That's cool, but to completely cripple the much more useful internet we have now because people don't like ads would be a disaster. It's baffling to me how some people would prefer to just ban/restrict everything they don't like. Just block the ads!

As concerned as I am for my privacy and control over my information I don't know that I would accept a straight theory of "Advertising is bad".

1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.

2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?

3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?

In other words, is this an even remotely in any parallel universe a thought-out, feasible suggestion?

>1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.

You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.

>2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?

Because I don't like any of those things: advertising, tracking, or profiling. Advertising in its own right is mind hacking and I am wholeheartedly against it.

>3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?

Word of mouth would be permissible (and within that, reviews), but it'd be illegal to pay for reviews. You could offer sponsorships, but only talk about them in your own domain (such as your company's blog). A key distiction I'd make is between "pull" advertising and "push" advertising, and would make the latter illegal. If the user "pulls" your ads, i.e. specifically indicates that they'd like to receive them, for example by signing up for your mailing list, then that'd be acceptable to me (opt-in, not opt-out, and harsh pentalties for buying or selling lists of emails).

There's a lot of nuance and you would find it difficult to find an unamgibuous definition, but that's also true of all other laws. The law is not a turing complete program, it's a system interpreted by humans.

>>You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.

I don't believe this is feasible:

1. For all people

2. In all circumstances

3. For all products - especially new ones, or radically changed/improved ones. I may simply be unaware something exists. And reviewers need to find out about it somehow. And to the point, how will ANYbody find out about ANY product if we "ban advertising"?

Believe it not, most people out there in the wide world are not fellow geeks who get bodily joy out of researching products that interest them :-)

That would be about as effective as banning money.

I don't see how that would be possible.

There are effective bans on advertising for certain products, e.g. cigarettes, in large parts of the globe.

Which are acceptable because people generally (in many places), are fine with discouraging, or certainly not promoting, the use of tobacco products (and some other product categories) even though they're legal. This is not true with the usage and purchase of most other legal products.

The irony is that, as with anti-smoking, massive ad campaigns would be necessary to convince the citizenry to favor a ban on ads. Time for "the ad to end all ads?"

Banning advertising in general actually sounds more feasible than banning poorly-defined "targeted advertising".

It's very simple actually. No more sponsors, no more covering every square meter of public space with brands, no more commercials on TV, no more ads on websites. People will have to find other ways to make money, no one's entitled to a business model.

Most (in fact, almost all) advertisements are not on “public space”, they’re on private properties.

Alright, then ban displays of advertising if it has to reach eyes that didn't ask for it, the same way we ban pornography, gore or violent stuff on display.

So, does that mean everything has to be packaged in the same grey form factor as to not advertise their product? You walk around a city and see lots of Coca-Cola branding on the bottles people carry around. That's also advertising.

If you don't ban this, then whomever can pay the most at stores for product space would take over the market. Actually, that would likely happen even if you remove labels since people will be picking essentially at random.

100% this. Advertising is the new smoking, it's bad for us in ways we're only beginning to understand.

It’s a lot worse than smoking. It damages your mind, whereas smoking only damages your lungs.