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I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've str

• deleted 1y ago
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• LunaSea 1y ago
  > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
  • hanspeter 1y ago
    It's interesting that you leave out Google (and similar search engines). We would lose one of the most useful tools introduced to mankind in the last 3 decades.
  • Henchman21 1y ago
    Very little of value would be lost.
  • immibis 1y ago
    Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value? The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads. We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
    • worik 1y ago
      > Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. I keep hoping that decent aggregators will emerge - or I will find the ones that exist. I am happy to pay for news, but I cannot afford to pay for all the ones I want, and I cannot afford the time to read all I want. I would like to pay good aggregators....
    • vitus 1y ago
      > The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. I have some questions about your vision. - How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube? - Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall? - What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
  • pseufaux 1y ago
    TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.
    • LunaSea 1y ago
      They already have this choice and don't pick it.
      • dcow 1y ago
        Choosing “free” in free vs paid is not the same as choosing “none” in none vs paid.
  • jajko 1y ago
    Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name. Most people never even thought about ads that way. For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      > I detest being manipulated It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.
  • chronogram 1y ago
    News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news. TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.
    • LunaSea 1y ago
      Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions. Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
      • azemetre 1y ago
        If there is such a small ability for the average person to make SMB viable without massive subsidies by advertisers maybe it's time to argue that there should be more public investment and grants given to independent journalists that meet a certain criteria.
        • ipaddr 1y ago
          Government paid press? How long before someone realizes they better write inline with current government views. Who would a Trump government hire/fire who would a Biden government hire/fire.. independent of what?
          • wild_egg 1y ago
            Many countries have this in various forms and it works out fine. Generally illegal to interfere with the press and a good way to lose the next election
          • azemetre 1y ago
            You realize NPR and PBS, along with the foreign US press (name escapes me), have been a thing for 50+ years right? Laws can be written in a way to guarantee independence from despots too. Idk it feels better than this whole private affair where rules are arbitrary and the only thing that matters is how many ad impressions you sell.
  • inopinatus 1y ago
    only the shit ones
  • cauch 1y ago
    Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume. This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.
    • parkaboy 1y ago
      Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies). Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel. Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack. However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses. All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
      • 1y ago
  • Enginerrrd 1y ago
    I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month. Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.
    • wintermutestwin 1y ago
      I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)
    • hanspeter 1y ago
      Could you explain how you arrived at the $3.50/month figure? The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users. Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.
      • Enginerrrd 1y ago
        I calculated this with some degree of rigor as a VERY conservative estimate of their ad revenue from me. THAT came out to more like $3 and I just adjusted for inflation this time around. I don't really recall the details of that calculation unfortunately. But it would have been based on cost per ad view (no clicks) times the number I expect to be shown in a month. The model I'm suggesting would be more like I load YouTube up with $10 and slowly burn through it as I view videos instead of being shown ads. The cost per view could actually be just as or even more transparent. Perhaps videos are tagged with the cost to view, which could open up a whole new world of economy among creators to gatekeep with higher fees themselves if they want to value their videos at more than the default. Being transparent on pricing this way is literally using the exact same infrastructure they already use to price ads, just letting me pay the cost instead of the advertisers.
  • jzb 1y ago
    "But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out." The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising. It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
    • theamk 1y ago
      Which models are there? The only other ones I know is patreon-like, which totally destroy the long tail. And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
      • jzb 1y ago
        Are you referring to a model for supporting YouTube hosting the videos or for the people who produce the videos? YouTube already has subscriptions. An ad-free YouTube could extend that and maybe add lower tiers of subscriptions for X hours per month viewing. This would be a double-win, if YouTube's were centered around catering to users and not maximizing time on site with The Algorithm(TM) to ensure people see more ads -- which also encourages some of the worst content on YT. But a big shift like ridding the world of advertising would, of course, have tradeoffs. Maybe that would be "long tail" videos on YouTube. If you can get rid of ads and have to lose those, is it worth it? Conversely, what has advertising killed off that we might be able to have again if it was gone?
  • TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out. Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form. I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models. (Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
  • appreciatorBus 1y ago
    * “the newspapers, tv channels and YouTube content that had so little value to society that no one was willing to pay for will die out.” Yes.
• nofalsescotsman 1y ago
  Treating the symptoms is easier and cheaper. And let's be real, the money would rather treat symptoms than the cause. Convincing monied interests to stop advertising is not a realistic thing. This would have to be done through legislation and force. And I agree it should be done.
  • gigatree 1y ago
    Neither convincing them nor compelling them through law would work. I’m surprised the author can’t see that as an ad person himself. The incentives are too strong; if you outlaw them, they’ll just be circumnavigated in more nefarious ways.
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Law can be very strong but our "representatives" as of now aren't very good at representing the will of the people. The system can work but we vote in horrible people to execute it.
• Terr_ 1y ago
  It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable. On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.
  • timewizard 1y ago
    It's a pattern recognition machine dominated by reward feedback mechanisms. It's not hackable so much as it lacks resistance to environmental noise.
  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    The reality of "mind control" of those perpetually exposed to media has been a popular topic throughout the last half century at least. Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.
    • barnabee 1y ago
      This is precisely why I try to see as close to zero advertising as possible, and also why I will always actively avoid buying something when I do see an ad for it (if I realise this). I do not trust my in-built protections, so I’d rather not be exposed in the first place.
  • relaxing 1y ago
    Thousands of years of adversarial training is what made us controllable — stick with the group, and we’ll defend ourselves against the enemy.
  • autoexec 1y ago
    There are manipulation techniques we really can't protect ourselves against. It's like the optical illusions where even when you're fully aware what the trick is, you know the horizontal lines on the café wall are actually straight, you still see it incorrectly. Awareness of our weaknesses isn't enough to correct them. Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.
• mixmastamyk 1y ago
  > framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism… You’ll likely be pleased to hear they use the word “propaganda” for advertising in Portuguese, at least in Brazil.
  • nico 1y ago
    Same in Spanish. Propaganda and publicidad are interchangeable Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda
    • cassianoleal 1y ago
      > Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política). In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc. The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same. I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil. Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange. Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
      • schoen 1y ago
        English speakers often do care about the connotation of "propaganda" as something deceptive or manipulative (with the paradigmatic example probably being wartime propaganda which tries to influence populations, supposedly without regard for the truth). It's true that "propaganda" in the disparaging sense is more applied to political and ideological messages, but you can sometimes see it used about commercial messages when the speaker believes that those messages are especially manipulative, for example when the speaker believes an industry is bad but is wrongfully portraying itself as good by covering up harms that it causes. You might hear this more in connection with an "industry" ("tobacco industry propaganda" or "oil industry propaganda"), but I've occasionally heard it in connection with individual companies. But the negative connotation is pretty strong, so some listeners might be uncomfortable if they don't share the speaker's views of the propaganda author. One can also say that a book is propaganda in the sense that the book is dishonest and manipulative advocacy, where the author isn't showing respect for the readers. I wanted to write something about the question of how American rhetoric (and courts) see the relative value, or relative harmfulness, of commercial versus political advertising. But this turned into a complicated discussion that I'm not sure I can do a good job of, so I'm going to hold off on that for now.
• exe34 1y ago
  I find it hard to imagine. I hate advertising as much as the next guy - I intentionally try to associate negative thoughts with any adverts that interrupt a video I'm watching (I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past). But how do you separate advertising from product recommendations? Would it only apply if the person doing the recommending is getting paid for it?
  • sharemywin 1y ago
    does youtube exist without advertisers?
    • exe34 1y ago
      peer to peer, yes.
    • thunky 1y ago
      Yes it's called YouTube Premium and its not free but also not expensive. It's possible that the cost would go up without ad revenue from "free" YouTube.
  • mathgeek 1y ago
    > I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past I totally relate to the “I’m OK with certain types of advertising” angle here.
  • barnabee 1y ago
    If they are paid and the consumer didn’t ask to see it, either because it’s inserted into the web page / video stream / whatever they are actually trying to consume, OR because because the whole thing has a paid bias or ulterior motive.
• thimkerbell 1y ago
  It's been tried, in sci fi. The result is Influencers.
  • Benjammer 1y ago
    If the influencer is actually giving good advice because it's illegal to pay them to promote a product, is that such a bad thing? What sci fi are you talking about?
• 1oooqooq 1y ago
  1. this is not new. radio, print, theater... every thing was monetizing attention to great success. 2. all advertising venues (radio, web, print, outdoors) all make boatloads of money during political campaigns AND government "awareness" campaigns (which are all disguised political campaigns with tax money). most radios stations yet around, live exclusively of this revenue. so, the system was built on the two premises you wrongly consider side effects or unintended consequences. making it illegal is the only alternative. everything else is just ignoring the real cause: it was for exactly that.
• kragen 1y ago
  It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals. To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
  • cogman10 1y ago
    > it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US). The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad". > To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?" Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it. There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
    • 34679 1y ago
      I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?
      • cogman10 1y ago
        That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix. I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective. But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
• Ferret7446 1y ago
  > imagine a world without advertising I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies. And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
  • the_cat_kittles 1y ago
    hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess
  • nazgul17 1y ago
    Perhaps just banning algorithmic advertising would be enough?
  • margalabargala 1y ago
    > If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small. For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.
    • abracadaniel 1y ago
      Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
      • chgs 1y ago
        I don’t know if it’s America or tech people but online discourse of legal systems from American tech people seems to treat laws as code, something to interpret as written rather than the meaning. Loopholes are celebrated as being clever and are impossible to patch. This is quite alien to most of the world.
• ipaddr 1y ago
  Probation only moves the activities underground. Not focusing on ad tech specifically but removing all advertising would mean finding other ways to get your message out which is advertising. The only way to stop it is to stop communication in form and function. Limiting certain types of advertising or changing tax codes to not allow dedicating expensive could shape it in a way that meshes with society. Trying to rein in the abuses you saw in the adtech world starts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft being dissolved.
  • SllX 1y ago
    Google and Facebook sure, you could even make the argument that their non-adtech businesses would be collateral damage, but Amazon and Microsoft have substantial non-advertising related businesses. I'm curious why you lumped them in?
    • ipaddr 1y ago
      Amazon makes a lot from Amazon ads in their own search results. Also Amazon prime. Microsoft from bing / Windows ads. Just in news/search they made over 10 billion. Microsoft / Amazon most the bulk of their money in the cloud.
      • SllX 1y ago
        Well that’s not quite correct. If you look at their most recent 10-K, Ads made up about 8% of Amazon’s revenue. The bulk of their revenue is still retail (online, physical and third party seller services) with AWS providing about 16%. Microsoft’s largest segment is cloud, but it doesn’t quite provide the bulk. Their ads business is small compared to the rest. Certainly killing advertising would hurt them, but I’m not seeing a mortal wound here, so I thought I was missing something when you lumped them in.
  • threatofrain 1y ago
    > Probation only moves the activities underground. That implies that people want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Which actually already impinges on advertising because advertising doesn't want to be secret, advertising wants to be as visible or popular as possible. Advertising is inherently easier to regulate because of this.
• QuantumGood 1y ago
  Propaganda does not need advertising to disseminate itself, particularly not in 2025. There are multiple channels. Limiting one—advertising—just moves the flow to other channels.
  • jkhdigital 1y ago
    Yes. Not all business models utilize public advertising. For example, MLMs like Amway and LuLaRoe. Advertising didn’t exist for most of history because mass media didn’t exist. Advertising is part and parcel of mass media.
    • QuantumGood 1y ago
      Marketing existed, it was just a higher ratio of publicity, merchandising and astroturfing than today.
• pessimizer 1y ago
  > framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves. > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. Through what mechanism? Wishes? I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned. If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process. What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.
  • barnabee 1y ago
    > Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. When I am unable to avoid it (which I’m relatively successful at), it’s how I explicitly decide what to avoid. See an ad, penalise the company. But yet I have no trouble finding and evaluating products when I actually need something. Search engines, real and virtual marketplaces, word of mouth, reviews all exist already, and all can work without paid shenanigans. There’s no need to replace advertising, we can just ban it.
• deleted 1y ago
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• njarboe 1y ago
  One bright spot is that I find it much easier to avoid ads in my media than in say the 1990's. There is usually a higher paid tier with no ads. Youtube, X, HBO, etc and ad blockers on the web. I'm off of Google search with Kagi. I mostly use services that I pay for an much prefer that model. But everything going to LLMs will make it harder to see/know about the ads. Google search was great when it first came out and then SEO happened. How long before you (NSA, CCP, big corp) can pay OpenAI to seed its training data set (if this is not already happening)?
• deleted 1y ago
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• amelius 1y ago
  What I'd really like to see is a study on how much advertising drives consumerism and thereby eventually climate change / pollution. Maybe this could start some discussion.
  • Phanteaume 1y ago
    I got the thing for you : a governmental report that showed that advertising as it exists today and ecological transition are not aligned. Pardon my french, though. https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapport%20communications%20commerciales.pdf https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
  • amelius 1y ago
    Can anyone say why the sibling comment, pointing to this official document (see link), is heavily downvoted? https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapport%20communications%20commerciales.pdf https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
• aaron695 1y ago
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• dangus 1y ago
  Let's talk about the modern world then. You want to get away from the grind of working for someone else and sustain yourself on your own. Perhaps you could turn into a subsistence farmer making every home product you own on your own or in a small commune, or perhaps you and a group of employees could buy your existing employer. But the other more realistic method is that you would start your own business so you no longer have to work for someone else. 19% of all American adults are starting or run a business. It's a very common way to make a living. IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further. People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off. There would be no chance for other companies to enter markets because they would have no realistic way of spreading the word about their alternatives, not even for small local businesses. The proposal is not just radical, it's downright moronic if you've ever been in the shoes of owning your own company.
  • sapphicsnail 1y ago
    > People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off. I wouldn't be surprised if these brands are so dominant because they can afford to flood the country with ads.
    • bdangubic 1y ago
      I am 50 and I can’t recall more than 3 ads between these three companies. especially apple… ads may get you first X customers but the reason tide/apple/cc are dominant is because they made shit that everyone wants. coca cola is such a ridiculous product that there isn’t a situation/place/… on the planet where asking for one is odd. you can be in 876 star michelin seven-years-long-wait list restaurant as well as nastiest rats-on-your-should shithole and asking for coke would be the most normal thing
    • dangus 1y ago
      This is true. Big brands that have advertisements all over like Coca-Cola do it precisely because their position is so saturated and dominant. They need to remind you about them even though you already prefer them and know they exist because they want you to buy more than you would otherwise. I still think a lack of advertising for smaller competitors really would be devastating. DuckDuckGo and Reddit achieved pretty amazing recent growth aided by major outdoor ad campaigns. These were sites that were not market leaders in their categories and had a lot of catching up to do.
• threatofrain 1y ago
  But the way you frame the problem suggests it's not tech people's responsibility at all. It's a much bigger issue of governance that society as a whole must decide. Has there been any society on earth that has made the decision to ban advertising?
• sandworm101 1y ago
  >> We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making. That isn't all advertising. That is the modern algorithm-dependent systems that curate ads for individual viewers. In the good old days of print ads, ads targeted at say the readership of a particular magazine, we did not suffer from the downward spiral. There is no reason websites cannot have static ads. Many do. The issue is not advertising per se.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• grues-dinner 1y ago
  > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed". And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then? For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage. But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
    • grues-dinner 1y ago
      Sure it's just a thought experiment. But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts. You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively. Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
    • ta1243 1y ago
• noir_lord 1y ago
  That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product. I simply hate been manipulated. So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices. We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
  • kilroy123 1y ago
    I am the same exact way. When I visit my parents it's eye opening how much advertising they're bombarded with daily.
  • barnabee 1y ago
    100% agree. I am happy to pay for an ad-free version of a product I want but I will never use your product if I cannot block or remove the ads.
  • ruszki 1y ago
    Isn't Hacker News for advertising for Y Combinator and topics which are important to Y Combinator?
    • amelius 1y ago
      You don't have to drive every argument/position to its logical extreme ...
      • ruszki 1y ago
        Why not when I reply to a logical extreme, aka > all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product
        • amelius 1y ago
          Ok, good point.
  • 1y ago
• dragonwriter 1y ago
  > The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Advertising is just a name for a delivery mechanism for propaganda. Its not a difference of master, as is clear in the political realm where when we focus on a particular commercial delivery vehicle we talk about "campaign advertisements" but the content is still "political propaganda". > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making. No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products.
  • simgt 1y ago
    > No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products. Probably, but it would make advertising much more costly thus less appealing and reduce its market size. Just like for any other prohibited activity.
• ChuckMcM 1y ago
  I wonder a bit if this point of view is an 'age' thing, which is to say if you're under 40 it rings true, if you're over 40 it sounds silly kind of thing. I don't know that it is, it just feels that way a bit to me. What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal). By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad. If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too. Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail). I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.
  • emacsen 1y ago
    This is IMHO the right angle. Advertising is virtually impossible to stop, but more than that, is not inherently evil. Most countries include laws on how you can advertise. For example, you can't lie and make a claim that your product can't live up to, you can't use certain words or phrases, and you have to have disclaimers in some situations. In the mid-90s when Yahoo was a young company, they had a simple advertising model. The ad would be placed next to the section of the site relevant to the category. If you were searching for watches, a watch ad would be next to it. The advertiser would know how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on. They didn't have deep demographic data like they do today. The surveillance capitalism model is the predatory model. Advertisement is only one part of that industry.
• simgt 1y ago
  > check out the documentary “Century of the Self”. The editing is not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. You come out of it not really knowing what it did to you, but something changed. This is a fantastic recommendation, and Adam Curtis' documentaries are all on YouTube somehow.
• dostick 1y ago
  > What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering. Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with. If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used. For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance). And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.
  • nonrandomstring 1y ago
    > capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism. It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business". William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other. Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group". If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it. That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley. Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war. [0] http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf
• interludead 1y ago
  That line about the mechanical difference between selling sneakers and selling a political ideology being minimal - yep. Once you've seen how the sausage gets made in ad tech, it's hard to unsee it. It really is the same machine, just tuned for different outcomes.
• tjpnz 1y ago
  >We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm. We still get a choice about where we work, and we could choose not to put glorified ad companies on a pedestal.
  • febusravenga 1y ago
    I explicitly refused project related to mobile location data crunching few years ago. I told it loudly to my manager then, I was already thinking I'm too arogant. But it was outlr market, it worked out we've found other project. Now I would probably bend my neck and accept it. It's just not everyone has choice.
• khana 1y ago
  [dead]
• libertine 1y ago
  > The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still. The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology. > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers? One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.
• lordnacho 1y ago
  > Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making. We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy. But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• lll-o-lll 1y ago
  > The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. Which was obvious at every step of the journey. Google was, is, and always will be an advertising platform. Advertising was, is, and always will be the manipulation of human emotions and desires for the purpose of corporate profit. This is not a good thing! How did you ever justify this to yourself? I’ve had recruiters push the poker machine jobs, the ad jobs, the high frequency trader jobs… You get to look at the business before taking the job; work for better people. No shade on anyone who’s there because they just need a job, but if you have a choice, pick something better.
• Certhas 1y ago
  An advertisement ban is also an interesting idea from the theory of free markets perspective. Consumer needs are met by the most efficient producers, products compete for consumers on the market. That makes a ton of sense. But ad spending inverts this relationship. Consumer needs are no longer an external condition for the market but become subject to producer intervention. This creates a source of misalignment between incentives for producers and the public good. I think outlawing ads would go a long way towards fixing capitalism.
• ookdatnog 1y ago
  > The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive. If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds. In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed. Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically. But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care? But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue. So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.
• qoez 1y ago
  A lot of winners today are those that get away with greyzone illegal practices. The same would happen in a "ads are illegal" world. People would pay for word of mouth, or even pay influential people to casually talk about it, but it'd be off the books etc.
  • lolinder 1y ago
    If you followed this line of reasoning consistently you'd advocate for no additional regulations to ever be imposed by government and all existing regulations to be walked back. That is, to most of us, patently absurd. The answer to your objection is to enforce the laws that we have, not to never make new ones.
    • dingnuts 1y ago
      not every line of reasoning is intended to be followed to its fullest extent. one can advocate for regulation without advocating for prohibition without contradiction.
    • Muromec 1y ago
      People do actually advocate for exactly that.
      • kerkeslager 1y ago
        And as the poster said, that's patently absurd.
  • louwrentius 1y ago
    People still steal, but we aren't contemplating to just abolish the laws that prohibits theft. A new law is proposed and people may break it in the future. Is that a reason not to implement that law, because that seems to be the - in my view crazy - insinuation.
  • lambda 1y ago
    I live in Vermont, where billboards are illegal. It's great, there is so much less visual pollution driving anywhere. And yes, some people do try to push it, renting space to park their hay carts that happen to have their business information on the side. But you know what? Those cases eventually get dealt with too, and overall, the law is a complete win, even with a few people testing the line.
• mlsu 1y ago
  In tech specifically: is it the same mechanism? I mean, does commercial advertising and political propaganda flow through the same channel? I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove. I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary. And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects). I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.
• whacko_quacko 1y ago
  I feel that the lumping together of advertising and propaganda in the article is very apt. That's why I find it somewhat sinister. You should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything should be outlawed, it's the massive tracking effort involved.
• kevinsync 1y ago
  I actually kind of enjoy advertising -- most ads are shit, but some are very clever. Low budget ones make me laugh, or admire the (complete lack of) execution. I like to see the graphic design trends, the typography, the strange brand collaborations and IP tie-ins, the vogue cycles of looks, feels, musical choices, the trends that get beaten to death with a hammer. It's all very interesting, not to mention the glut of weird products, insane sales pitches, the general grift on display. Simply fascinating shit. Intellectually I know most people wouldn't mind living in a world without Slap Chop and those old Quizno's ads and Kylie Jenner solving racism with a Pepsi and Arnold riding a pennyfarthing inside of a Japanese energy drink bottle, but IMO that stuff really brings color to our often-monochrome human existence.
• KoftaBob 1y ago
  > The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays: "Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values." Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
  • beej71 1y ago
    Came to this thread to post that. Everyone should read _Propaganda_. It's public domain, found in various places.
• endofreach 1y ago
  > The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism You might enjoy reading about– or a book written by– Edward Bernays.
  • gcp123 1y ago
    Yes! The century of the self documentary I mentioned is all about Bernays.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow." I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription. Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged. But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing. Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.
• bigbuppo 1y ago
  It makes me happy that you left that terrible industry.
• WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  > The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. Indeed. Marketing is essentially capitalist propaganda. It promotes capitalism and consumerism in an implicit way, and doesn't even mention it. It's vaguely of like the statement "X is the way to serve god best". I'm saying that god exists without actually making that statement; it's implicit. If statements of this style were ubiquitous, they work as propaganda in a way far stronger that just repeating "god exists".
• ForOldHack 1y ago
  I would also recommend "Merchants war" by Fredrick Phol. WWIII was won by Madison Ave.
• betageek 1y ago
  I too spent far too many years in the adtech industry before realising that what I thought I was doing (helping fund cool things on the web) was not what I was actually doing (destroying the web as I knew it.) Having left it behind in the early 10s it's got way worse than I ever imagined, there's effectively no regulation at all now, and certainly no way of knowing where the ads stop and the content begins. Having sat in ad industry self regulation meetings myself I know the author is completely right, they will never do anything about any of the many many problems, so what else is there to do than ban it, nothing else is going to work with the system that currently exists.