Comment by OmarShehata
2 months ago
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows
the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.
Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.
No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.
The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.
You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.
This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.
I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
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I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
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And we could make those catalogs more appealing to the general public by inserting a lot of exclusive content like news, essays, or short stories.
I basically agree with the spirit of what you're saying but the line is not clear.
The appeal of a catalog is to interest a prospective buyer, not the general public. Once you start targeting the general public, you run into the issues the GP has identified.
I do think you're on to something.
What if we took the approach of creating a clear legal distinction between advertising companies and non-advertising companies?
For example, if you want to be an advertising company, there are limits on what and how you can publish (such as having to use pull instead of push channels), and you don't get to also try to be a product or service company. If you want to be a non-advertising company, then you can't publish advertising.
This seems effective and also a much easier scenario to envision for those who find legal restrictions on speech to be unpalatable or inconceivable. It is actually not that outlandish at all; rather it's well within the bounds of what we already do. We already categorize companies by function and apply all kinds of different rules (restrictions on where and when and how they can operate, requirements for licensing and registration, environmental standards, liability standards, taxation rules) to companies based on what they produce or what purpose they serve, and we already accept that doing so has societal benefits.
There is also plenty of precedent for regulations that discourage cross-category operations precisely to simplify enforcement and manage risk. Healthcare providers are separated from payers; drugs cannot also be dietary supplements; legal businesses can't combine with non-law businesses; and so on. Even if cross-category operations aren't completely banned, the rules create friction and deterrence that still has important effects.
> all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff
This is simply not true. You can buy or rent a server right now, run any kind of communication software on it that you want, and use that to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, 100% ad-free. There are even pre-existing software stacks, like Mastodon, that make setting this up trivial.
I honestly find it disturbing that you don't appear to realise that you are asking for control over someone else's communication platform.
You keep referring to companies, but companies don't make decisions, people do.
So your problem with advertising is really a problem with people, with human nature.
The truth is that whatever system you impose (with force no doubt!) would be optimized by the humans who exist in it.
> Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.
People are not born with a knowledge of all of the products on the market, and the current price ranges for them.
And that's—a problem somehow shared by someone who doesn't want to be advertised to?
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So your one rule is “money shouldn’t change hands” and your one solution is “product catalogs”???
> I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by...
Honestly, you couldn't have said that any better. I always think exactly about that. Where we are today, the technology that we have at our disposal, and yet this whole machinery working 24hs non-stop to put these consumption ideas on our heads, cheap propaganda and useless stuff to manipulate us like puppets. Really disgusting.
Bring back Yellow Pages.
> The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today.
The most prosperous society ever known to man, a veritable wonderland of consumer choice and entrepreneurial opportunity that draws people from all over the world to study visit and move here. What a mess.
So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
Having lived overseas, the US isn't a "veritable wonderland of consumer choice". There are 5 grocery store chains, for the great majority of the country there is one way to travel: car. At the store (Kroger), I can buy 2 kinds of salt on the shelves. Where is the "veritable choice"? It has been told in the advertising but the reality is very limited.
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> So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
Ha. Tell that to the millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.
That prosperous society and veritable wonderland is not looking so great these days. Perhaps the fact that the tools built for psychologically manipulating people into buying things can also be used to manipulate people into thinking and acting a certain way could be related to your current situation? Maybe those tools shouldn't have been available to everyone, including your political adversaries?
But hey, glad you're enjoying it over there.
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> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
> People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should.
Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion.
But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.