Comment by dkdcio

> Imagine the ad police. “You blogged about a product. Someone said you sounded insincere. Let’s see the receipt for purchase. Can’t prove you bought it? Prove you weren’t compensated for your blog post or pay a fine.” Kafka land.

immediately to a fantasy slippery slope argument, cool!

your argument seems to boil down to paid ads being the lifeblood of the flow of information. my argument is it corrupts that flow of information, and we’d be better without them —- everything would operate just fine. individuals and organizations would have better incentives to share valuable information, not what they get paid to. obviously there would be plenty of details and edge cases to work out, as with any policy in the real world

I’m not going to write out policy in HackerNews comments and play that game with someone who jumps to the “imagine this crazy world where the police start arresting all of us over free speech!” as their explanation for what would go wrong