by godelski | 2025-04-07 02:02:39+00:00
> Let’s see if we can define this

From Webster's

1: a public notice *especially* : a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest) 3: something resembling an advertisement (as in alerting someone to something)

Though I also like @trgn's reference to Justice Potter's Definition[0].

I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.

But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.

But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?

Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.

Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.