> All company's incentive is fundamentally to sell more product and advertising and marketing are the ways to do that. [...] There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to sell something if you live in a capitalist society. That's the way capitalist societies function.

Sure - but many actions are economically logical yet wasteful or destructive, and as a society we can adjust fines/tax rates/tariffs/subsidies/etc. such that the more constructive choice becomes the one that's also in the best financial self-interest of the company. Encourage improving the actual product with R&D instead.

That's not to say marketing spend should necessarily drop to $0, but I do believe it'd optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now. There's no good societal reason for the Monopoly Go mobile app to have a $500M marketing budget, for instance.

> Advertising is nothing more than a company communicating about their product [...] Independent reviews and word of mouth aren't advertisements because they don't originate from the company. If they pay someone to review their product then it is an advertisement.

This has improved in precision over "just telling people that products exist", though I'd still claim that there are ways companies can communicate about their product that I wouldn't consider an ad - like an ingredients list label, for instance.

No bright line, but I'd consider the distinction of "receiving information I solicited" (like with the reviewer signing up to an industry mailing list) vs "someone is paid to shove this in my face" to be an important factor.

> If you think people exclusively want a bullet list of features rather than a TL/DR about why that company thinks it's a better choice, you're wrong. Especially with the bazillion things in our lives less consequential than web hosting. Straws. [...]

Not sure where the idea that it should be exclusively bullet point lists comes from - an independent review can just as easily have a TL;DR or a numeric rating, and online stores typically aggregate customer reviews.

> I am not glad companies are trying to sneakily inject advertising into everywhere I go and that data brokers are doing their best to build the creepiest psychological profile possible. I'm happy to see a video of someone talking about something they like. I'm not happy about seeing a video where someone was paid to say they like it without disclosing that.

Agree.

> The problem is not advertising, or wanting to sell something, or even marketing. The problem is manipulation, unfair business practices, and lying.

I'd claim the problem advertising has is analogous to bitcoin mining. In theory there's probably some small fraction we could reduce it to where it'd have net-positive impact, by using some resources but providing value in facilitating payments. But unfortunately, there's a zero-sum game aspect to it where the "economically sensible" choice can be to effectively throw vast resources into a black hole - "competition" not directed towards achieving a useful end and growing out-of-control disproportionate to any value it might provide. There's also, piled on top of that, bad practices like restarting coal-fired plants - but critically the issue persists even if it was wasting renewable energy instead.

I think you see the bad practices of ads, but not really the zero-sum game aspect. Monopoly Go's $500M marketing spend remains enormously wasteful even without any deceptive or obnoxious practices.