by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-16 05:31:19+00:00
> No, the only purpose - and therefore the primary purpose - of advertising is to make a sale.

Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5fd7l2Uz0

In general there is the entire category of issue advertising where someone is trying to convince someone to do something rather than buy something. Non-profits also advertise to solicit donations, without which they would have a lot of trouble existing.

There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world. In modern day people use job search sites rather than newspaper classified sections, but those are the same thing -- the revenue of those sites is from listings or placement, i.e. the listings are ads, and if they weren't charging for that they would have no revenue to cover their expenses. Even Craigslist charges for job postings and car listings etc. and indeed that's how even they keep the lights on.

Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?

> Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.

That's pretty quickly going to lead to atroturfing which is even worse than advertising because at least ads tell you they're ads.

> The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.

Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.

> They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot.

What if sometimes they do?

Suppose you overstocked some product and you need to get it out of your warehouse to make room for other products that will be delivered next week. So you lower the price, and you can publish the lower price on your website, but you need prospective customers to know about the lower price right now, not in six months when they next visit your website, because you need that stuff out of your warehouse in the next 7 days. And they need to know about the lower price right now because that stock will only be available for a week, so checking the website twice a year would cause them to miss the discounted price. So how do you make thousands of prospective customers aware of a time-sensitive discount without making them check prices every day?

> Advertising is overly aggressive

That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.

> the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue.

This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.