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> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.

I'd love if you could expand how this applies to advertising. Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game, while polluting the physical and mental space around us. If it were to suddenly disappear (a wide ban, perhaps), it wouldn't make much difference to anyone except people working in ad/adtech space. Sure, the Internet would get leaner, but I strongly believe that what would disappear is mostly just garbage that's just contributing to information noise.

I go further than the OP: to me, advertising is - quite literally - a cancer on society.

> Voters are critical to democracy. Advertising isn't critical to society

Advertising is absolutely critical to society. Without advertising we can't figure out what companies are selling, because they can't tell us. That puts a real crimp of having a functioning economy.

I don't have statistics handy, but I assure you that if advertising were generally banned there would be a lot less, say, smartphone owners. If you think the average person is capable of figuring out what is available from word of mouth you are grossly overestimating what a normal person is capable of.

> Advertising isn't critical to society, it's mostly a way for a lot of people to waste a lot of time, man-hours and natural resources on zero-sum game

It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.

> if you weren't allowed to advertise, say, smartphones there would be a lot less smartphone owners.

That would certainly be a net benefit to societies mental health.

Not necessarily. Mobile phones are hugely important economic enablers and poverty is bad for every kind of health, not just mental.

Mobile phones, sure. Smartphones? That's a bit more debatable. At the very least, a cheap smartphone is probably fine for most "economic" needs. What we need less of is idle high-noise-low-quality content consumption, which is also the thing that's most supported by advertisement.

Smartphones, cheap or not, are not a problem. The core benefits they bring to poor people are mobile data connection, web browser, phone connection and IMs bundled in a single device. None of that is "supported by ads". The problems of smartphones (that are beyond mobile phones) start with the application ecosystem, completely disfigured by the cancer of advertising.

Fair point. Most of us here on HN don't require smartphones for that, but I take your point. Everything you list as a key benefit for poor people doesn't require an expensive smartphone, or at least, wouldn't if adverts weren't sucking up the compute and battery power when using a web browser ;) More seriously, though, beyond those basic capabilities, which we (ie not poor people) have had as long as I've been using the internet and while crappy adverts have always existed (punch the monkey and win a prize!) online, the amount of low quality content we consume has increased substantially, largely due to social media imho, which is supported by ads and is what I'm arguing against. I don't disagree with what you said here at all.

How many work/social hours are lost to mobiles.

I know for myself a huge amount are gained, or saved. Being able to check email, keep in touch on Teams and SMS, track my meetings, etc save me a handful of hours every week. They're some of the most valuable hours too.

That's motte-and-bailey defense. Technically advertising is about informing consumers what's on the market. In reality, it's everything but. Real-world advertising is near-universally dishonest and manipulative. Getting rid of that would not preclude companies from making available (note the pull, not push, approach) information on what they're selling.

> It isn't a zero sum game. It is value add. People can't exchange money for goods and services they want if they can't find a vendor selling said goods and services.

It is. People can trivially find any goods and services they find through catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines. Advertising spending is mostly about shouting loud enough to get heard over shouting of your competitors - which is a zero-sum game of ever amplifying noise.

> In reality, it's everything but.

Well, if you have evidence of that then my interest would be piqued. But I must admit I suspect you're just being cynical. By far and away most of the ads I see are honest but with an agenda.

Manipulative is a debatable term. Advertisers are manipulating you in the same way I'm manipulating you right now - I have an opinion and I want you to agree with me. I don't really see how you can justify getting unhappy about that. It seems pretty reasonable given that they are ultimately funding whatever it is you are looking at at the time.

> catalogs, phone books, trade shows, and Internet search engines

Those are literally compendiums of ads, except search engines. But in this instance, the consumer is proactively searching for ads. Clearly the ad is providing some value to consumers. And the idea that consumers should attend trade shows to work out what their options are is patently absurd.

And working out exactly what search engines would look like if they were not ad supported is beyond me. I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards.

> People can trivially...

No they can't, decisions about things outside a person't domain of expertise aren't as easy as you want to pretend they are. What the consumers really want is (a) cheap and (b) one of what everyone else has. Advertising isn't going to help with (a) but it is fantastically good at (b).

Figuring out what everyone else is doing is hard work. That is one of a couple of value-adding opportunities for an ad.

"I assume you'd be paying some sort of subscription free for the pleasure of basically googling ads. Seems a bit backwards."

Back in the day, many better mail order catalogs cost money to receive. Mostly to offset the cost of mailing them out, but partially as a form of filter, on the theory that someone sufficiently interested in a catalog to pay to get it would be more likely to actually order something.

Imagine if literally the only way to get a phone, or even find out what phones there are, was through a carrier store.

Take away advertising and the only way someone could find out about a product is word of mouth, or walking into a shop. Functionally everything would originate in shops. That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control you access to goods and information. It would revitalise the high street, that's for sure, but in a very controlling, rent-seeking way.

There are ways to optimize access to this information. Trade shows that display new products. Mail-order catalogs for companies or industry groups. Companies would find a way to make information - not ads - available for interested people to peruse. The core difference would be "pull not push", i.e. people with a problem would go looking for solutions, and very little space to compete on product information - preventing runaway zero-sum games.

Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising.

Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).

You can define anything as advertising if you try hard enough. That's not very helpful for trying to strike a balance, though.

Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.

Of course there are workarounds, but they are time consuming and therefore expensive, but also less efficient and reliable. It would be going back to the 80s, but even more locked in to physical outlets as gatekeepers. You're really just exchanging an inconvenience for a tyranny.

> That means looking at the available options would be very time consuming, involve a lot of travel and be dominated by very powerful gatekeepers who would control your access to goods and information.

You make it sound like ads are purely informational and designed to help us make an informed decision. Remember the iPhone ads touting "fastest iPhone ever" with the bottom text "sequences shortened"?

Did you buy your last computer with no research, just the ad? Do you go to McDonald's because the burgers look exactly like the ones in the commercial?

I agree that a world without advertising or news or reviews would be bad.

Your thought experiment isn't very useful for picturing a world that only lacks advertising.

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

This is not true and I'm gonna provide some evidence:

I am a conservative christian[0].

I get those ads as well.

My browsing habits:

- stuff linked from hn

- local news

- one mainstream newspaper

- fringe political papers from the left and right (mostly don't agree with any of them but it makes for interesting reading, a better understanding of why people are mad etc)

- christian podcast

- technical stuff (both related to work and to my technical hobbies)

- repair videos, childrens videos (when they get to borrow one of my devices)

And still I get ads for singles in my area. Extremely stupid ads. E.g.:

- when I'm at work in the middle of nowhere and I get ads with a picture of someone who is supposedly desperately looking for someone like me, supposedly living in the valley next to nowhere where there are nobody except old farmers. That kind of stupid.

For a while I tried to hit that micro x in the corner of those ads and mark them as irrelevant. Only got equally stupid ads for other equally irrelevant sites.

I don't want to remove ad income for honest writers but I've given up now and I'm ad blocking like many others here.

I've also come to the conclusion that tracking doesn't work, it is just a thing they do to scam marketers.

And I've concluded that if I were to place ads for a product I would place them based on the content of the website, -like Google used to do. If anyone wants a proven business opportunity here it is :-]

[0]: No, not embarrased by it, but I do not want to discuss that here, this is a technical forum. Just pointing out I don't visit what I consider sketchy web sites at all.

> I get those ads as well.

Yeah, everyone does. Are you suggesting you see almost literally 100 such ads for every ad advertising something legit? Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.

Honestly, the businesses in your region of the woods are truly woeful at advertising, and should probably spend more money on it. Realistically, if what you suggest is true, something has probably gone wrong and your demographic has been caught in a bubble where no-one serious is advertising to you. Because those ads should be in the minority.

> Because for me they are the 20% dross for 80% potentially useful ads I see.

Lucky you. For me it seems way below 50% useful.

The closest I get to relevant ads are if I search for something like x hosting, then I'll maybe see ads for that for a while.

Im not against ads:

In fact I'd like if local shops informed online whenever their deal of the week came out (they sometimes do and that is a click from me if for some reason the ad isn't blocked).

Same goes for other interesting ads if I see them, which means max twice a year.

Oh, ok, so it’s his/her fault for seeing the “wrong” ads? Gotcha.

> Honestly I think your 99% figure just suggests you are browsing the wrong websites. Maybe visit parts of the internet that are less sketchy.

Those are the kinds of things I see mentioned on Twitter. I use iPhone, so I don't see why I would see internet ads myself. Obviously as I am someone who doesn't like ads, I'm one to block them.

There's adblocking in mobile Safari since 2015? So there's very few ads that I see since then (the digital ads in the last month I've come across: "powered by x", "powered by y", and "you can subscribe to z at url" - I'm happy with those). Comparing life before mobile adblocking and after, I don't see that since then I've missed out on anything. People, without an interest in the success of ads, who come across an ad on their devices seem to find it irritating; haven't found anyone who didn't seem happy and kept using uBlock after showing how.

> The point I'm trying to get across is that something can be critical to a functioning system even if on its own it doesn't look very impressive. Voters are the scourge of every democracy, they push for all sorts of stupid policies and usually get them.

Eh.. am I living in some kind of singular utopia then?