Comment by iammjm
3 days ago
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.
I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?
There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer, and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more established photographers would absolutely dominate my little rural market even when their photography was worse.
Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.
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> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.
If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.
How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?
Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?
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I don’t think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are choosing to pretend the ads you don’t mind aren’t ads at all.
You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.
And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.
Isn’t the catalog an ad?
The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.
A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?
Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?
That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.
For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?
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There are no successful economies without ads.
Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.
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Yes, the store has a catalog. They want you to see the catalog, so they pay someone to tell you that the catalog exists.
So instead of buying ad space we can now buy catalog space and reinvent the wheel.
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Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in practice?
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So stores are just one form of ads then, let’s ban stores too while we’re at it.
Not everyone lives close to stores.
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Catalogs are ads.
The fix is actually fairly simple IMO, though will never be implemented. Make all ads passive, e.g. require people to explicitly ask to see them. For example, when I want to see what new video games are around, I go to review sites and forums. It's opt-in.
Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.
But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that show you ads.
Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.
Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.
Magazines, phone books, friends, stores. You know you could go to a store (or call them on the phone!) and talk to a person. "Hello, I am trying to find a thing to help me with X."
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.
Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
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Magazines and phone books are often largely ad-supported. They largely wouldn't exist without some amount of advertising.
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If a product is really that good than people will legit recommend it. It's not a problem at all.
Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with.
Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.
If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
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How does the first person find the product to recommend it, though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without being recommended by a previous customer.
If you waited for an ad to solve your "legitimate problem" you didn't have a problem to begin with imho
No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.
It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.
The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...
But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.
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Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two different things.
I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.
This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.
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You might not know it is a problem and that it is solvable.
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I have never in my several decades of life seen and ad for anything and thought "I need to get that".
I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had previously purchased identical products with their own money.
Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.
Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads? Housing ads?
I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.
Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.
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I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for Action Man™ during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit this response from kids, and that I should always think critically about the messaging in ads.
Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.
There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.
Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.
The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.
And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.
Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient, especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad tech is definitely this).
Historically, yes. People in their 70s might remember that time. But language has moved on. Advertising now means manipulation. The ad market is priced for that. The rare cases of someone wanting to use advertising channels to put out actual information now have to pay a premium.
Ads should be centralised state department and run through only approved and regulated bodies at regulated sites.
I wonder if there's a middle ground, where you only have statement based, textual ads. Amusing ourselves to Death (great book btw), discusses how until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements. The invention of slogans and jingles was the start of the slow downfall in ads.
I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.
> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements.
I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card
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Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one who finally got me to :)
I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A very good and short read that I find continually relevant applying the same ideas to social media.
Adverts I specifically request are fine. Trailers for example -- I specifically go to youtube to find trailers.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
The bigger problem is those fake "realistic robot dog" ads, and all the other ai-faked products.
Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.
They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.
>Why YT and Google in general would want
They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads.
Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.
Even as a consumer I am legitimately happy that I’ve seen ads for some products.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
As a consumer, I am fully willing to swallow the opportunity cost of blocking advertisements. I'm not afraid of having unspent money sitting around.
Advertisement also more or less puts a wrench in the theory of capitalistic competition in that companies would be incentivized to create the best product for the lowest price supposedly. They're now just incentivized to create the best ad campaign which costs money and does not improve the product in any way.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
Furiously seconded. Ads are just a tax that we pay both with our attention and then with our wallets. Every dollar that a company forks over to Google is a dollar they recoup by passing the costs on to you, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the product you're paying for. Destroy this heinous rent-seeking industry.
You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service. Increasing the customer acquisition cost for a company to infinity doesn't make them lower their prices. It makes them go out of business because they have no customers.
People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
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>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.
This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.
Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).
Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.
As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed
Is there not always some sort "marketplace" where people see what's being offered one way or another?
I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.
>Is there not always some sort "marketplace"
How exactly does that work for virtual products?
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Most of the YT ads are AI rubbish. I can't imagine those fake "realistic puppy" ads generate any sales whatsoever. Same for the monocular that can zoom into a book title from a mountain range away. And nearly all the other YT and news feed ads one typically sees.
Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.
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How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.
Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?
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>All ads are poisonous
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
Exactly. I hate seeing ads when I do not want to, and I love going out and buying a furniture catalogue. The difference should be obvious.
The problem is not ads. The problem is SPAM.
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
Hard disagree, without any ads the only way to find out about new things is via word of mouth, which would make many valuable products never get off the ground. Ads done badly are poison but ads done well educate people about new things they can benefit from and drive the entire economy. I have had many experiences where I’ve seen an ad that I genuinely think is interesting and was enlightening to find.
>The world would definitely be better without ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
Why would it be impossible to start a business? You would still be able to list your business in mediums where potential buyers willingly go and search for products and services. If anything, it would level the playing field, paying more for ads would not mean you getting your poorer services more visible buy paying more for ads.
Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?
The very concept of fair pricing is an advertisement. In nearly all of history the merchant would charge what they judged you could pay. but keep those noses up HN.....
How are the ads that local grocers and restaurants mail to me telling me of sales or giving me coupons which let me get things I'd be buying anyway for less money poisonous?
If you were going to be buying it anyway why does it even matter what the price is? Why can't they just list it at the coupon price for everyone?
Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.
I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.
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> All ads are poisonous.
Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.
Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
Obviously, if you could just delete the ads without changing anything else the world would be better, but that's not how it works.
Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but
- TV was twice the cost
- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription
- All news was paywalled
- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist
- etc etc
I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.
When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
> When we used to pay for newspapers
Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.
At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
Definitely the world wouldn’t be better without all ads, because that would be a clear violation of free speech.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
Free speech does not mean you get to yell at me. In the same way, banning ads where they are shown to users without their consent would not mean violation of free speech.
ads aren't free speech, but corrupted speech
If free speech is you rolling up with a megaphone to yell promotional nonsense at me, then it's my free speech to vote for you to get banned I think.
That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium.
You guys did not read past the first sentence?