The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.

  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    143
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    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.

    • stormeuh@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      49
      ·
      1 day ago

      It’s also such a funny contradiction: a big part of the free market model rests on the idea that well informed consumers can vote with their wallet, which should reward good businesses and punish bad ones. Yet it is very difficult to argue consumers have ever been informed enough to make this work, which is in large part due to advertising flooding communication channels with noise, and also because it is unreasonable to expect a consumer to be fully informed for the hundreds of purchases they make on a daily basis.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      26
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      You cannot get away from advertising, ever, in any society, in any financial system, at any point of time in history after tribal societie.

      It’s a concept that you can’t just “ban”, nearly all the problems we have with it today is because it’s uncontrolled and abused. The concept itself though is as unbannable as the concept of “selling” something.


      The concept:

      “trying to find someone who can use something you made”

      Is literally as old as humans moving away from tribal societies.

      You can make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows about it, it’s still useless.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        40
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Lmao, this is absolute defeatist nonsense.

        “You’ve gotta help us doc, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.

        Because here’s the thing, you literally just can ban advertising. Ban billboards, ban tv Ads, ban social media advertising.

        You can still have companies publish information about their product, but that’s not what advertising is in the context of this discussion.

        • zedage@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          1 day ago

          Right there are plenty of ways for businesses to get consumers to choose to use their product other than advertising which are far more conducive to consumers being able to make an informed purchase decision without being manipulated. But doing so would upend the existing power structures of who gets to sell more product, so disturbing the status quo just requires more political will than anybody really has.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            2 hours ago

            Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it’s not.

            Laws change.

              • masterspace@lemmy.ca
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                6 minutes ago

                In both situation you make it illegal for corporations to do something, and punish them with fines and criminal sentences for executives if they’re caught doing so, leading to a decrease in that behaviour.

                So what about the situations do you see as different that makes it a false equivalency?

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 day ago

            Graffiti, you say? So it was probably illegal.

            I know the rule of law is in sad shape right now, but companies still avoid doing illegal shit right out in the open, and that’s all that’s needed to cut back dramatically on advertising.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          23 hours ago

          No they didn’t that’s not banning advertising but that’s regulating a specific type of advertising.

          There’s a pretty big difference.

        • AugustWest@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 day ago

          And if you have the name of your business and what you sell on your store front? That’s advertising. Or a card with your name on it to hand out to customers or coupons. That’s advertising. Or logos on clothing or a sign that sits near the road that says SALE. That is advertising.

          OP was downvoted for saying the truth, regulation is important, but businesses will fail if they have no way to catch your interest.

          In fact it gets worse because small businesses will never be seen because nobody will have heard of them and everyone goes to the big store everyone already knows about.

          There is balance to be had…

          • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            23 hours ago

            Lemmy is essentially just like Reddit at this point. It’s just a bunch of the lowest common denominator circle jerking a lack of critical thinking.

            You cannot have intelligent discussion, and group think is all that matters. Folks will not read your comment, they will find the single phrase they disagree with and hold onto it for dear life, missing the entire point.

            And then ignore the whole premise and idea behind the discussion and reply in a way that makes absolutely no sense if they had average reading comprehension…

            I miss the old Internet, where you could actually have discussions and pass ideas back and forth.

            • sinceasdf@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              22 hours ago

              This is a new phenomenon here in my experience, the cynic in me says this is ad companies trying to control and shut down the conversation as Lemmy grows. Better to have your opposition not have a realistic and feasible route to their goals.

              It reminds me of how close the US was to actual police reform before all the discussion became “defund the police entirely” like that was going to just suddenly fix everything and cause no other problems. Then the whole movement just basically evaporated.

            • AugustWest@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              22 hours ago

              I was really suprised to see downvotes for your comment. It was balanced and demonstrated nuance for the concept.

              We have an example of an advertisement from 3000 BCE. This is part of the human condition of transfer of information with a hey I make a cool thing, interested in buying it?

              Now as for Lemmy, I hope it doesn’t get completely bad like reddit. The worse offenders are political or ideological posts like this one.

              I am still have good discussions in other areas, so here’s hoping.

              I miss the old internet too.

      • Zachariah@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        Don’t ever—for any reason—do anything to anyone for any reason ever. No matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever…