This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?

The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?

What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?

What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?

I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?

Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding

The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.

Video game loot boxes are technically legal but most of us don't want children gambling. Even if the game company doesn't pay you for weapon skins, there's such a big secondary market that it constitutes gambling anyway. Just like the pachinko machines.

There are two ways of trying to achieving goal. One is to start from big picture, think if we even want to do something, then plan how to go there. Second is to start from technicalities and probably immediately go nowhere.

You are starting from technicalities before you even took the moment to actually think of goal is worth it.

If it is worth it and we would indeed be better off - plan how to go there, it may not be easy, but it will be possible this way or another. If it is not worth it after all - just say it, no technicalities needed, redirect time and effort elsewhere.

It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast. Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.

I think it is a good question, but there are some answers. For one thing, it is paid for, though a system set up for the purpose of putting commercial speech on someone else's profit making media.

Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.

The answer is the same way we banned cigarette ads.

Well, the thought piece had one simple answer: Were you paid to say it, with the intent of motivating said person, to buy a product?

Though, this piece made me groan with the buzzwords "a micro-awakening of the self." Great way to make me cringe if I send it to someone.

> Were you paid to say it, with the intent of motivating said person, to buy a product?

For the waiter, this is probably true.

Then illegal. Simple. And I like it tbh

So we exempt waiters. No one seriously thinks waiters are what the article is about.

I use ublock origin on Firefox and next dns on my router with a block list. I pay for ad free YouTube. My kids had a lesson in how annoying commercials are during a trip where they tried to watch a BBC animal documentary and had to see the same commercial five times in a row because I guess not enough advertisers signed up with the provider. I don't like billboards. I'm pretty sympathetic to getting rid of advertising and do so as much as possible in my own life.

That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.

Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?

How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.

Anyway, this seems impossible but good luck!

Glad to see this, been noodling on it for a long time. My crazy proposal is to make advertising illegal, in the US... by nationalizing Craigslist. USList or some such.

No more billboards, no more ads on TV or radio or podcasts or when you're on a plane or when you're in an Uber and they have that screen. You want to advertise to, say, all the people in Arkansas? You have to pay them directly to post your ad on Arkansas USList. Want to target further? Great, you have to pay the county to post on their board. Then, people that want to see your ads can go to their local board, filter by their interests, and maybe see your ad. Want to target all the electricians in a county? Their union runs a board and you can pay them.

Cities/counties/states/${localeType}s could opt to, say, issue an advertising dividend to their residents.

My definition of advertising is the unwanted stealing of your attention by someone who wants you to buy something. Or be aware of something you could buy. It takes you out of a context you have put yourself in, stealing your attention (and therefore your time, which is all we really have in this life).

My stupid USList idea flips this on its head by making it possible to only see ads when you want to.

Movie trailers when you're at the cinema are ads, sure. But they are ads that fit the context you've put yourself in. If you're at the theater, it makes sense for the playbill to list other shows. If you're at a restaurant, the list of specials, or a wine recommended by your server are both appropriate. Even a list of specials or deals in the window of a restaurant, as long as it isn't 100x100ft and illuminaated, is fine by me.

But an LED billboard distracting you with a 2-for-1 meal deal as you drive down the freeway is out of your context (and dangerous! and needlessly polluting!)

Like I said, I've been noodling on this for a while and am definitely the crazy anti-advertising guy in my circles. But once I point out the prevalence of ads and how it's like being kicked in the knees all day, I've found people seem to start getting it. I've done more than a few pihole + wireguard installs, UBlock origin + Sponsorblock installs, etc. Fuck ads.

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil.

It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, and by making alternatives accessible to customers, without relying solely on monopolistic platforms or the randomness of word-of-mouth.

That said, today’s ad ecosystem is far from ideal - often opaque, invasive, and manipulative. Still, the underlying idea of advertising has real value. Fair advertising is a hard problem, and while reform is overdue, banning it outright would likely create even bigger ones.

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products.

It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

> It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility,

That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. Do they not buy up more advertising too? Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything

I don't think it should be referred to as a 'necessary evil' (by the following definition of that term):

             "something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result"

For one thing the term 'advertising' is broad same as many words (ie 'Doctor' or 'Computer guy' or 'Educator'). Second it's not unpleasant although like with anything some of it could be. (Some of it is funny and entertaining).

> Advertising has consequences

Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside.

Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements.

As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves:

https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...

> Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it—but it’s also a necessary evil.

At one time, definitely. Now though? We all carry around all of humanity's collective knowledge in our pockets. If you need a solution to a problem you have, if you need a plumber, if you need a new car... you an get unlimited information for the asking.

I don't remember the last time I responded to an advertisement. If I need things, I search Amazon/Etsy/local retailer apps or just go to a store. If I need contractors, I check local review pages to find good ones or just call ones I've used before. And some of that I guess you could call ads, but I mean in the traditional sense, where someone has paid to have someone put a product in front of me that I wasn't already looking for? Nah. Never happens.

1. Discovery For known problems, sure! we probably don’t need ads anymore. But for unknown problems, we still do. When you're not even aware that a solution exists, or that your current approach could be improved, advertising can spark that initial awareness. At that stage, you don’t even know what to search for.

2. Competition If you know better alternatives might exist, yes, you can search for them. But how do you search for better deals, services, or products for every little thing in your life? You don’t. Nobody has the time (or cognitive bandwidth) to proactively research every option. When done right, advertising helps level the playing field by putting alternatives in front of customers. And in doing so, it also pushes businesses to keep their offerings competitive.

Review pages are often ad based. Unless you paid for it. But I still think having to pay for reviews is a better option. That way the reviews are the product not me.

Well some of this is a gray area right? If you have a listing website for example that lists all the electricians in a given geographic area, that's technically an ad, but you'd assume someone wouldn't be looking at the page unless they were looking for an electrician. I wouldn't call that intrusive or unpleasant or worthy of a ban and I don't think anyone would.

I think taxing ad revenue and investing the proceeds in research and social programs is the middle path

I like that a lot. Same reason plastics and fuels should be taxed but not outlawed. If some rich dude wants to drive a land yacht, he can pay it into the welfare system with his gasoline taxes, win-win

Define advertising. Studies suggest that as much as 80% of news articles may have been placed by PR firms rather than generated through independent reporting. This forum is a classic case where blog posts are masquerading as authentic content, when in reality, they're simply another form of advertising.

To go halfway to the extreme of this article, I think banning large-scale billboards in my city would make a big difference.

It feels like having a calmer public space is more in the public interest than reminding them to drink Miller Lite.

Some countries (Poland?) has experimented with banning advertising in public spaces. Think bill boards. This has lead to very clean and good looking cities. I don’t think the it’s unreasonable to ban ads in other places too.

Submissions from yesterday and 3 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580586 - 8 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558438 - 4 comments

This seems to focus on online advertising. The question is how would you pay for many things on the internet?

I remember fondly the early internet which was full of hobby sites and forums and niche link rings. This was an innocent better time where the internet was full of small scale creativity and sharing and mostly kindness.

The early internet, which I was a part of, and think of fondly, didn't have anywhere near the utility of the modern internet. It was fun to explore, but you couldn't DO much.

I hosted my own site, in my bedroom. I hosted a counter-strike server, too. Comcast hadn't shut hosting down yet.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with online banking, services, security, apps, media. Let's just use youtube--one of the greatest sites of all time, hands down. Huge utility, huge entertainment. Free, via advertising. Would have never happened without it.

There's so, so much trash, webspam, etc on the modern web. I hate it, too. I don't even have warm feelings about youtube anymore. But advertising opened a lot of doors.

There must be a reason someone hasn't invented a browser plugin for microtransactions on the internet?

I'll gladly pay 25 cents to read an article from a news website, but I won't subscribe for a whole year for $25+, especially when there's dozens/hundreds of sites.

Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem, but that could be mitigated by depositing say $15 at a time and deducting from the balance each time.

This is the great white whale of the internet. A platform for this would clearly be a thing of value, but extremely difficult to do because you need to booststrap a two-sided market in an environment where all the existing established players are incentivized NOT to participate.

This is something I explain too. I’d gladly pay maybe 10 cents for IntelliJ but it’s the Pirate Bay otherwise. Just set the pricing appropriately. It costs $0 to make a copy so it’s an infinite margin. Same with most SaaS. About 20 cents per month should be the maximum. Any more than that is gouging.

Hiring engineers is even worse. I think about $20/hr should suffice but there’s this big fuss kicked up about “they’re not willing to pay enough”.

I am pretty sure that if people had to find away to make things profitable they would.

There are plenty of payment mechanisms already used online.

IMO it would be well worth paying for things so I am the customer instead of the product.

Many things could be replaced. My use of FB could be replaced by forums, for example. I would quite happily pay the bills for old style forums that replace the FB groups I admin (although not the costs imposed by the Online Safety Act, but that is a UK only problem).

How many things on the internet do you really need and that are paid for via advertising?

Sign me up for a monthly internet pass. Shit, bake it into my monthly internet access fee and make it so the service providers then pay back into internet infrastructure. Just like we do for radio and TV.

I'd love to see the internet become relatively non profit, instead of the current for-profit, for absolutely shit model we are living in.

>I'd love to see the internet become relatively non profit

The stocks haven't gone down enough for your liking?

Who is going to know about your product if you cannot advertise it?

More than ads, it's engagement algorithms that are killing us. We should outlaw those first and then see where we end up. Engagement algorithms do nothing except ruin society by incentivizing content creators to lie to us, and to make videos that are psychically horrible to society.

Another approach with overlapping effects is to make companies extremely liable for misuse or mismanagement of personal information.

There would still be advertising, and maybe even some personalized advertising, but in many cases they might decide the risk isn't worth it.

It would also impact data-brokers and operations that don't strictly rely on direct-to-consumer advertising, like background checks, but credit scores, sales leads, etc.

I'm extremely skeptical that there's any meaningful reform to be had with liability for misuse. Demonstrating misuse is a substantial legal hurdle that no one is going to litigate in court. Even with severe and proactive enforcement, it'll just incentivize shell companies to act as liability shields.

Immediately reminded me of something I read a couple of years ago https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html, which has some strong opinions on why advertising should be banned

This makes no sense. I build a great product. How the hell am I supposed to tell anyone about it outside of my immediate friends and family? Am I supposed to rely on the network effect to reach an audience? That sounds insane.

Capitalism depends on advertising to let people know of the product or service that is more cost effective than existing solutions. The advertising budget is dependent on knowing your product is actually good enough to justify the expense. Without advertising, competition itself doesn't work.

Well, personally, I think you shouldn’t even tell your friends and family. That kind of “native advertising” is ruining human relationships. People should stumble upon your product. If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company. Even so-called “catchy domain names” are a deep evil that we didn’t have in the heyday of the US: the ‘70s. Your product should be named exactly what it does and your company should be named as the concatenation of its products.

In this way we can eliminate manipulative marketing and rely purely on quality.

Don’t need to make it illegal just make it not deductible.

Most people who protest oil use cars, roads and plastics, all made of oil.

And people who object to advertising live in a world in which their daily lives are provided for by companies that depend on advertising to exist.

As PT Barnum said "Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!" and all the companies that make up our economic ecosystem depend on things happening …. sales, which don’t happen without promotion.

Advertising has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and will be around in 5,000 more years.

I actually in principle have no fundamental problem with advertising, but it's execution on the internet I have many, many issues with. Putting an ad in a newspaper, or on the side of a building, or during a break in a tv show seems perfectly reasonable to me.

What I absolutely have issues with is targeted advertising, having to modify content to make it advertiser friendly (i.e. reasonable people on YouTube having to avoid swearing/use infuriating euphemisms for self harm or suicide etc in case it makes the video not advertiser friendly), and the frankly offensive and unjustifiable amount of tracking that goes along with it.

I wish we could ban dynamic advertising (can't think of a better term, as in targeted, tailored advertising that is aware of what it's being advertised against) and just allow static advertising.

I also wish it could be codified in law that what is shown to me on my computer is entirely up to me, and if I want to block advertising on my computer, that is my choice, in the same way I can make a cup of tea during the ad breaks in tv, and skip over the advert pages on the paper.

> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.

...

> 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.

Humanity had hatred and insular bubbles a millennia ago just fine without advertisements. There was genocides and wars before the current form of ads ever emerged. It's a shame that so many people think that changing a financial policy is all that is needed to change an ingrained human behavior.

In the last 40 years how many millions of man years have been put into manipulating people/breaking down their internal barriers by the ad agencies? By social media companies? By media companies? In the hundreds of thousands of man years at least (but more likely in the millions to tens of millions). There have been around 80 billion human years of output in that time and sales are a huge part of civilization so easily in the 10s of millions of human years of energy put into how to better manipulate/break down/re-train people.

If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, your above argument makes sense.

If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 man years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.

Europe has perhaps stricter rules on ads, but they're absolutely not banned, at most they're restricted but that just means you'll see different ads, rather than no ads

You're referring to outdoor advertising; the article is talking about something much more fundamental. But of course you would know that if you had read it

Could you name 3?

Ok...

First, it is 100% free speech.

Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.

Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.

Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?

> First, it is 100% free speech.

It's speech for sure.

> Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.

Except that they can and do, as you outline below. All laws are arbitrary.

> Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.

Firstly, the fire thing is a myth. Secondly, so we're just quibbling on "overriding" then?

> Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?

Well because none of your points are that conclusive?

An outright ban on advertising makes for a compelling thought experiment, but ultimately it's too simplistic to work as a real-world solution. The fundamental issue isn't advertising per se; rather, it's the aggressive exploitation of personal data, invasive tracking, and addictive attention-maximizing techniques that power today's ad-driven business models.

Banning ads altogether wouldn't automatically eliminate incentives for manipulative or addictive content—platforms would quickly shift toward subscriptions, paywalls, or other revenue streams. While this shift might alter harmful dynamics somewhat, it wouldn't necessarily remove them altogether. For instance, subscription models have their own perverse incentives and potential inequalities.

Moreover, completely removing ads would disproportionately hurt small businesses, non-profits, and public service campaigns that rely on legitimate, non-invasive ads to reach their audiences effectively.

Instead of outright banning ads—an overly blunt measure—we'd likely achieve far better outcomes through thoughtful regulation targeting the actual harmful practices: invasive tracking, dark patterns, algorithmic manipulation, and lack of transparency. A better approach would aim at reforming advertising at its source, protecting individual privacy and autonomy without crippling a large segment of legitimate communication.

> What if we made money illegal?

Good luck.

This is free speech. It's not open for discussion.

Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away.

We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.

If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Of course it's open for discussion. Free speech is not limitless.

You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts.

Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.

I feel that this is a very black and white view of the issue. I don't want to see billboards as I drive down the freeway, but I have no choice (in the US) if I need to get somewhere far away. Several states have banned outdoor billboards, should those governments be dissolved?

At some point the public interest overrides an absolute freedom of speech. We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion" is objectively incorrect.

It's just paraphrasing the declaration of independence. This is already the established world order.

You have an extremist point of view that your right to free speech is granted to you by the government.

> No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

The author is off their chair. Yes, even commercial speech is protected as long as it’s not fraudulent. And there are already laws prohibiting nuisances. Advertising isn’t a nuisance in any legal sense; it just comes along with the ride when you willingly consume sponsored media.

Listen to and watch only public media, and stop going to sponsored websites and using social media if you want to avoid advertising. It isn’t the most convenient thing, but it’s not impossible.

If you disagree with this comment, please respond instead of downvoting. Don’t be a coward.

Such a low quality article. Nice to see it as #1 on HN. The webpage is also poorly constructed where the menu isnt aligned with the top of the page.