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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.
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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.
“what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?”
lol what? No way anyone says that with a straight face
5 minutes ago on Hacker News, among a lot of stupid stuff like “your life is empty without having ads all around you.”
Reference for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596333
I love that in Cyberpunk 2077 they’re is often a channel on called “just ads”. Of course in pure cyberpunk style those ads can be horrific.
There are shopping channels in many countries (or at least paid cable television) which are literally just ads. In classic cyberpunk style, it’s a reflection of the dystopian present.
That’s not an ad, it’s the “Scamming old people by phone” show.
They’re on HN acting like Googling and getting WebMD is uüuber rare
When I watch a US sport, I’m blown away that the ads are all medical, banking/insurance, cars, and maybe fast food. It’s so weird.
Don’t forget personal injury or liability lawyers.
And gambling.
What’s a normal selection of sports ads look like elsewhere?
Every time I watch premier league it’s just gambling ads nonstop lol
I was going to note it down as I was watching F1 at the time of writing that comment. There was a kids hospital charity, a food charity, a car, other sport, and a travel/tourism ad.
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.
Wow, even if we imagine some different situation where information about a new development, service or creation is needed, that’s what reviews and journalism are supposed to cover, not advertisement. (In b4: the observation that those have tragically been becoming more and more indistinguishable from advertising.)
In fact the pervasive drug commercials were illegal until the 1990s because why would you target the patient rather than the doctor?
They are still illegal in many countries.
As they should be
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?”
If only there was a system of interconnected knowledge bases where new information could be published and indexed for easy lookup… Nah what am I saying, who would have interest in such a thing…
Don’t be silly, no-one knows what a library is these days! They’re all stuck on that internet thing.
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.
There is some awareness effect, too. If I like burgers and see a listing for a new burger place in my neighborhood, learning about a potential new place I’d like to include in my going-out rotation feels like a win. If I need a home repair and see a neighbor with a yard sign for a local contractor, that’s helpful in compiling a list of potential companies to check out.
What about word of mouth? If I want to find a good place to eat, I find asking a local “hey what’s the best restaurant around here?” to yield way better results than ads.
It would be totally sufficient if those things are listed in search engines or maps. Not as ads for other searches but as actual results when you actually search for that stuff. If you like burgers it would be no problem for you to type “burger near me” into your favourite search engines once in a while if you feel like something new. Same for home repair etc.
Getting rid of advertising in a capitalist society would be devastating for all new and small businesses. Start an IT company, tow truck company, Trash removal, plumber, electrician, pest, all dead. Really any company that isnt already known would likely die, and the current large companies would be the only ones that exist. Also what counts as advertising, am I going to jail for telling my friend about a new game I tried? That’s advertising.
You’re absolutely right. Any small business left would beg big corporations for buyouts, for pennies on the dollar. Small time influencers would skirt it by the millions. It’d make cyberpunk fiction look tame.
It might be better if some “standard catalog” was popularized, but still a calamity.
Yeah I mean a had a Lyft driver give me a card for her son the other day who opened a mobile hair salon. Is it useful for people, sure. Could he exist without advertising, absolutely not.
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There used to be a business catalog book called “yellow pages”. Now there are map applications, price comparison sites, customer review sites, and keyword search engines. All of those make advertisements unnecessary.
That’s advertising. The entire phone book was a sold adventure. Jail, prison, what is the punishment for advertising. I think people have forgotten what advertising is. I ask you you favorite movie, you answer, advertising. If you tell me Lemmy is a decent place, advertising. Any app, game, movie, music, software, hardware, car, plant, advertising. Stop talking about any object if you want ALL advertising to be illegal as the description says
Advertising is pollution
I’ve always thought of it as waste of our mental resources. But pollution describes it even better.
Pollution specifically engineered by psychologists to maximize its impact.
Emotional pollution Mind pollution SOUL POLLUTION
Advertising might be similarly harmful as lead in drinking water.
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.
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.
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.
It’s already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
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…
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.
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.
No they didn’t that’s not banning advertising but that’s regulating a specific type of advertising.
There’s a pretty big difference.
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.
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.
You can find ads for products in Roman republic era graffiti. We have had ads for thousands of years.
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.
no it wasn’t illegal. Grafitti wasn’t always a crime.
People who think they have a right to deface other people’s property say the weirdest shit.
Again graffiti was not always seen as a crime. Remember many paints weren’t super permanent when applied to things like brickface for most of our history.
Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it’s not.
Laws change.
That’s a false equivalence though.
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?
Painting graffiti and dumping hazardous waste in rivers are not equivalent crimes hence the false equivalence. Did you really need that clarified?
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”
Freedom from mind flaying (advertising) !
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?
Otters!
Wait, no, geraffes
Geraffes are dumb. Stupid long horses.
Birds
Well obviously, we all know birds aren’t real
There are ads on the very right side, middle, of this picture
oh nice catch. In retrospect this might actually be an older photo.
Strangely, I don’t see any people, mainly because they’re either so small they appear microscopic in the picture, or because they’re being blocked from view by the buildings.
Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better
We have this in Maine and it’s wonderful. Any time I drive through another state, the gross billboards are such a jolting sight (and blight).
We don’t have billboards here on O’ahu and it’s great. When I went to visit my family on the continental US (Boston and Florida), it was very annoying and distracting to see them everywhere.
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.
The privacy thing isn’t necessarily part of advertising though.
Advertising can be as complex as targeted algorithms built using harvested information and even AI bullshit, or as simple as a sign by the road saying “next right for MegaBurger” or even a small box with “Bob’s autoglass repair” in the paper.
It’s the volume and invasiveness that’s a problem. Ads in your mailbox, ads in your inbox, ads on your streaming service and when you turn on your Roku etc etc acting as blockers to the content you’re actually looking for.
I’m totally cool too go back to having an “autoglass” or “plumbers” section in paper and online yellow Pages etc, which target people actually looking for a service. I’m also cool with places which I subscribe to advertising me deals I might like (not so much signing me up for their shit the first time I buy from them), but the shoving crap in people’s face and information harvesting that needs to end.
Hell, I even have a collection of saved ads that were clever and entertaining I’d share with people, yet most companies go for volume (both audible and amount) over substance
Also roadside advertisements for services are also acceptable, what I mean is something like Peggy Sues dinner where they’ve got some signs to let you know which off ramp to take. Frankly speaking allowing gas stations and food places to advertise off the side of the highway is pretty reasonable to me, even in the modern era with phones the usefulness of them can very either because you don’t want to look at it while driving or it’s just got no signal.
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.
How did it go? Why did they stop it?
As far as I can tell, they didn’t stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo’s ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.
Thank you for the links. I’ve been there recently, and everything felt cold and gray. I could not really understand why, since all of Brazil feels so charming, green and vivid. Maybe your argument explains a part of it: since there is no advertising, there aren’t many colors on the streets (it might’ve been my impression, tho’).
that’s interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there’s certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!
There are! And a lot too!
The thing is: São Paulo is a city made mostly to walk. Going by car is a nightmare, and public transportation (the metro) is quite good. The center of it all, the most iconic place, the “avenida paulista” is quite iconic, but full of gray. The main attraction are the buildings, which are huge. I’d say most of them are banks. And the more you go around, the more you feel the need of green places.
It’s a big city, there are some huge murals and street art, but it feels cold. As if it was put there just to check a mark on a “good city needs this” list, but not as natural evolution of the city.
The things I’ve felt there:
- Huge city, truly makes you feel small
- The floor, walls and sky are all gray, all the time
- People are stressed and running to go from place A to place B
- Lots of homeless people, everywhere. Not a shelter around nor anything close to help those people.
I’m grateful to you for digging those up.
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
“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?
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.
Adding “destructive fines” to my list
If fines aren’t a percentage of quarterly or annual earnings they don’t matter. Ten million to a company earning billions isn’t even a rounding error. But 30% of their gross. They’d respect that. They’d have to.
“We need a large group of ideologically committed bureaucrats willing to impose policy in the face of a defiant, intractable established opposition” is simultaneously true and not terribly helpful, unless you can show where these people are coming from.
Like, we’ve seen instances of this happen before. Elon’s DOGE is a great current example of a group of ideologically dedicated barn burners. The OG FBI was another great example of a department effectively founded to militantly oppose a well-financed and popular opposition. FDR’s court appointees (and his arm-twisting with the threat to further pack the courts) could be considered another.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations (other than the Trump Tariff goons, I guess)? Dems are Pro-Business. Republicans are Pro-Fascist Business. There is no leadership, outside of a handful of die-hards like AOC and Bernie - who could conceivably be both willing and able to execute on these kinds of reforms.
I wish there was. But this is just pie-in-the-sky dreaming until you can find a municipal or state government with the kind of people engaged enough to rally for it and seek promotion to the federal level on this kind of platform.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations
Very few people currently in the modern political system could or would be willing to take them on, true. But we have 2026 to start filling the next House and a third of the Senate with people who would be up to the challenge. We need to primary strong candidates and we need to platform third-party candidates wherever they can actually win.
To those who say “there will be no more elections” - yes, that’s what they wanted, but what they have actually done was dismantle the government and set the US careening towards economic collapse. With Trump’s brain failing and his administration making idiotic mistakes left and right, we shouldn’t assume they’re going to get everything they wanted exactly how they wanted it.
These are unprecedented times, but the 1930s were unprecedented times too.
Progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.
Then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1930
FDR also came into the presidency after a devastating economical collapse which we are just one ecological disaster away from experiencing.
