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0 pointsLexGray2y ago0 comments

Isn't looking at an Apple device just like looking at a newspaper? I seem to recall papers being chock full of ads outside the front page to a far greater extent than the Apple News app.

Our society depends on advertising for promoting new services, gaining new customers, and building trust. I would call it a social necessity which makes it very ethical as long as it is truthful. The hijacking that occurs is consensual as you should not visit sites if you disagree with their advertising habits. Even with the App Store almost never open it directly.

The ones that cannot be avoided are in the outside world. I would celebrate if every billboard, postal mail item, and other real world advertisement were banned completely as that is the part I have no direct control over.

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gochi2y ago

This is a super fascinating comment, because why wouldn't you just want better advertising regulations across the board instead of trying to justify one form while proclaiming the other is harmful?

lancesells2y ago

> I would call it a social necessity which makes it very ethical as long as it is truthful.

Disagree on this one. Blogs, media, social, word of mouth, etc. would still exist without advertising and would serve the purpose of all of those things. PR teams would become as large as marketing teams, things would get exploited (they already are), but we wouldn't be subjected to distraction and manipulation.

I don't think ads are the most evil thing there is, but society would be fine without them and you would probably see a much smaller imbalance of power in wealth and companies. I'll take 1000s of small forums compared to one big Meta.

throwaway02232y ago

Honest question: what kind of "blogs" and "social" would survive without advertising? What kind of content creator can produce quality content in the long run, for free?

The Verge? Nops. Techcrunch? Also not. AnandTech or Business Insider? No and no. Hackaday? Dead. NYT and Bloomberg? Maybe, and likely not. And what about your top 20 favorite YouTube creators? The majority would be gone.

Sure, the long tail of quirky small bloggers would be unaffected -- they don't really make any money today from advertising. But a lot of them are bottom-feeders; they consume content produced by others, and re-hash to add their own takes.

And we're not even talking about the second order effect -- all the ecommerce companies that would be wiped out without qualified leads and traffic. Go to any site - The Verge, Hackaday, Daring Fireball - and see the ads. Most of those companies would disappear.

Is this really the web you want to live in? A web with only a handful of publications with large followings who can command premium subscription (read: The Information, NYT, Stratechery, etc), and the top x% of privileged wealthy folks who can afford paying for a bunch of subscriptions?

Yes, I would call advertising a social necessity. It's like a multi-dimension version of prisoner's dilemma - it may not feel you're winning, but the alternative option is much worse.

wkat42422y ago

I already don't see ads on any of the sites you mentioned and I haven't for a decade thanks to Raymond Hill. Clearly they're able to survive with a significant percentage of users saying nope.

nativeit2y ago

Out of curiosity, in these flights of fantastical hypotheticals where “advertising” doesn’t exist, or at least the advertising industry, why are we assuming the other features of capitalism would remain?

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