Comment by phantasmish
3 days ago
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.
If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area] that’s hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and pricing info, great! Yes, please!
I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.
Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such and such street is, well, an ad.
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Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you don't pay up for the features.
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And who puts together this magic directory, without pay?
Who is maintaining and paying for this directory?
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If I need a photographer, I'm going to go and search for one. If no one is allowed to advertise to me, then both the small and large players in the space are on an even playing field. Your photography website or Facebook page will be just as searchable or indexable as before, as will business directory sites that can help people find services they need, along with reviews and testimonials.
Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.
Back then you'd have physical bulletin boards where you could either freely pin your handwritten note/"ad" onto or you'd have someone do it for you. Still technically an ad though.
It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.
I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.
Capitalism always hides behind the petty business owner/store owner/craftsman. Then the haute bourgeoisie takes the bulk of the profits.
Maybe every advanced social system has a propensity towards totalitarianism. Similar criticisms can easily be foisted on feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, anarchism, etc. I think in Western Liberal Capitalism there's still space for a middle class. More, it appears the peculiar features of this system have enabled it to unlock tremendous social vigor and provide for the People historic material wealth. Perhaps what's missing in this system isn't material...
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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?
> 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?
You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.
My man that’s an ad
Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK
> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!”
So, place an ad in other words.
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Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.
I’ve yet to see a single product that isn’t related to domains existing products solve problems for. That is, I’m aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged suddenly.
So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.
New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.
Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.
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?
Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
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.
I understand what you mean, but I would modify this statement a bit:
There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.
There is not any real-world economy that has implemented that information exchange in the absence of activities that would be accurately described as advertising.
Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.
All that can be regulated though. In many jurisdictions, it's forbidden for lawyers or pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products with it being regulated what counts as an advertisement and putting oneself into the phone book or putting a big sign with “Lawyer” on one's practice is allowed but putting oneself into a magazine or on television is not.
And it should be.
There are no successful economies without blue paint, either. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.
> There are no successful economies without blue paint
I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.
> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
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Saying you want some sort of discovery mechanism is different than saying the current ad tech malware landscape is a "necessary evil." It certainly is not.
Not only did I not say that, but I also agree with you completely.
You're right, but I think this just highlights the issue with market economies.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.
> instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around
Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.
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Alas, well-regulated market economies are the least-worst option we have.
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.
The principle would be that companies aren’t allow to buy placement. It would be like a phonebook.
That would require regulation, as a catalog maker isn’t going to turn down what is effectively free money. This also doesn’t translate well to a physical store with more constraints on space.
I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).
Yes, instead they register 1 million businesses that will all be listed in the phonebook.
How do you sort the directory? Alphabetical can be gamed with names like A1 Locksmith. Chronological favors incumbents or spammers depending on direction.
Which company is on page 1?
Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in practice?
Impossible to solve I’m sure. Probably lower priority than stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to make businesses do or not do things.
By making it illegal? Brands can still compete on price and quality.
Grocery stores are a low margin business. If you make selling shelf space illegal, they lose that revenue and will have to raise food prices to stay in business. This isn’t a good outcome. I also question if the shelves would even changes much. They will probably prioritize their high margin products, which doesn’t sound any better.
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What’s the legal way to arrange things on a shelf?
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.
Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.
I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.
Catalogs are ads.