The web has been cleaned with uBlock Origin. Doing that IRL would be great. And for every stupid counter argument (I've seen those on HackerNews), I don't tolerate brain washing.

The most stupid argument I've seen is from an American who said "what if you don't know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?" Well, that's the job of the doctor. Your society has failed if you rely on marketing to eat random chemical dangerous stuff.

The economy should exist to serve real needs of the people. All that advertisement does is create a fake desire for consumption which simply wastes respurces.

Advertising is pollution

It's also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.

Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.

It's a "rich get richer" mechanic that any halfway competent dev would've patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.

People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.

Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That's where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.

None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.

"THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING"

It should be text only, purely factual, and very limited.

“We are blah, selling blah for $x, at $location”

Advertising is illegal in São Paulo. At least, outdoor advertising is illegal.

Look closely -- what don't you see?

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.

Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better

Sao Paolo did this in 2006.

Under the cult of the "Invisible Hand of the Free Market", the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.

Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.

I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn't a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.

What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.

“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?

As I sat down this morning to enjoy my warm and full-flavored Folger's coffee, it got me thinking: traditional advertising might disappear, but something sneakier would inevitably fill the void: product placement.

#YES, PLEASE.

I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:

• I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
• I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
• I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
• The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
• Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
• Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.

It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.

As someone who had designed and attempted to sell things. On of my key takeaways has always been the lack of awareness or knowledge of my things exists.

Granted if I put a 50ft build board in the sky it wouldn’t change much. But if I did more than I did.. or am doing it would help.

I saw a metaphor in this thread comparing advertising to Smoking. But I think Sugar is a better comparison. Is it needed? No. But a little will go a long way, and some dishes wouldn’t exists without it. Add to much and it ruins the flavour of the dish and isn’t healthy for the consumer.

What is needed is balance and where everything has hyper sugar in it isn’t good for anyone. So I do we need a rethink, but eliminating it outright isn’t the solution.

Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it's not something that can change based on individual effort.

The thing is I don't think I would mind advertising if it wasn't shoved down my throat 24/7. The fact I can't read a webpage without ads blocking everything, I can't watch TV without more than half of the show's runtime being ads in and out of segments, I can't even step outside without seeing the billboard or another 5 ads shoved in my mailbox!

I get 15 some-odd emails a day from different companies trying to get me to buy things. I block them and they pop up with a different email address. I can't even open my email without ads popping up masquerading as actual messages (Gmail). Don't get me started on the entire Google app thing.

I can't open an online map without getting SPONSERED listings. And places I use the app to order from try to advertise me their own food WHILE I'M ORDERING. Panda Express started asking me if I want a subscription to Starz or whatever.

NO. NO. NO.

I'm exhausted. I want to go to a store without being immediately inundated with ads or sellers. "Buy this!" NO. LEAVE ME ALONE.

I'm overwhelmed. I'm overstimulated. I'm done. I don't care how "quirky" or "flashy" or "hip" your ads are. I refuse to buy anything I see ads for now. It's too much. Shut up.

TL;DR: we need controls and limits to who, what, where, and how things are advertised. It should be an enforcable crime to have ads louder than a certain decibel for one. But it's not enforced and fines aren't more than a drop in the bucket. I doubt I'll see it in ny lifetime.

Pretty dumb article if you spend more than a second thinking about this issue.

The entire historical premise that we "didn't have ads" is so fucking incorrect and reeks of appeal to nature. Yeah we didn't have tv ads but we had monarchs and elite that played the same role. How is paying of some sleezy high up salesman is different from a Google search ad? If anything the latter is more ethically apt.

I'd take democracy with ads over whatever the fuck that alternative timeline that polices "unpaid word of mouth"

I'm just going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you can and should donate to your Mastodon and Lemmy instances, even if it's just $5 a month. That's how we band together to keep these platforms ad-free, and I don't know about you all, but I love that my mind isn't being manipulated here.

I think life would feel more calm, spacious and peaceful.

That'd be great, but the "how" is a much harder question. What counts as advertising? Because there's a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.

Should I be able to say "X product has been great, I recommend it!" Only if I'm not being paid, you say? How could you possibly know?

As discussed in the article, "propaganda" is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal. Propaganda doesn't mean false, it just means it's trying to convince you of something. An advertisement. Heck, the article itself could be considered a form of advertising for legislation.

It's just so trivial of a concept to say, but the moment you spend any amount of time thinking about it, it falls apart. It's like trying to ban the Ship of Theseus from a club.

Personally I've been of the opinion that advertising, at least in its current form, should be illegal since I was about 15. I'm not 100% sure if it should be completely illegal, or just very heavily regulated. Even after all those years, I'm still baffled nearly every day that people around me seem okay with current advertising.

I refuse to watch all advertising.

Cool idea but we live under the violent imposition of capitalism.

what if we made capitalism illegal? because all of the bullshit like advertising is symptomatic. the root cause is capitalism. western civilization has to be reset entirely. and it will never get done through protesting.

I’ve had adblockers on my browsers for years and pay for ad-free streaming. I easily went over a decade without seeing an ad on a screen in my own home. But when I’d go to a restaurant that had TVs (or to my mom’s house where she’d run the TV constantly) I’d marvel at how unwatchable it was. Just a constant interruption.

My wife has a friend who produced a TV series for Tubi and so we signed up to check it out and, wow. I had to tap out of watching it because of the ads. Just completely obnoxious and loud.

Oh what a world. But it would NEVER happen. Might as well wish for super powers.

Los Angeles county vs Orange county.

LA allows billboards, OC doesn't. It just feels so much cleaner and like a breath of fresh air as you drive from LA into OC.

I think regulation is better than abolishing it.

With most initiatives that have been made in good faith to avoid bad actors, it will usually hit the little guy the hardest.

In my country, for example, you can apply for grants for your business for developing your business. Great right? Wrong. The bureaucracy is so crazy that small businesses, whom this grant was aimed towards, cannot feasibly take the grant. It is too expensive for them to go through all the steps to get the money for the developmental aspect of the business that they would lose money as a business and not be able to recoup their losses. The grant money are so small and aren't allowed to be used to run the business at all that it simply isn't worth it to even try. You would essentially have to work for free for days or weeks in some cases to get this tiny portion that will now sink your company instead of developing it.

However, a big business with many employees and time and money to spare, could easily apply for the grant and get it without a sweat, despite them not needing it at all.

That is how I'd see a potential ban of ads affect the market. The big businesses who got to benefit from ads and marketing in the past will continue to do well because people know them while any and all new start ups and smaller businesses would drown and go bankrupt due to them not being allowed to make people aware of their business.

It is a bit too utopic for my taste to suggest a ban. But regulation would be a good thing in my opinion.

I concur.

Some places limit advertising more than others. Banned on footpaths and dangerous spots. What about sales persons? How do you brand a product? I think it would have to be well defined.

I am ok with technical information being provided by a staff member. So much shit is peddled through marketing. As the scientist designing the product, I want to tell them the truth, customers love the truth, in this regard. I think banning deception and conning further would be a good way. And fuck this debt model of economics. And how about universities turn back into noble education organisations, not cocksucking psuedo-businesses.

I think govts/politicians like keeping the vague open because they use it, too. Their propaganda departments are cucked with good fact checking teams.