Should billboard advertising be banned?
bbc.com
bbc.com
Here’s São Paulo’s welcome sign coming from Guarulhos. There are lot of billboards before it, but exactly none after.
— G.K. Chesterton
The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
> — G.K. Chesterton
> The correct amount of advertising in a society is not zero - we all like finding out about things which will actually help us - but it is not unbounded either. The advertising machine acts according to its incentives, and will not rest until every spare surface, every quiet moment, every gap between thoughts is up for auction. It must therefore be restrained so that other uses of space can flourish.
Wow. That was perhaps the most eloquent thing I've ever read on the hacker news. Thanks for posting it!
Edit to say - he was making a joke, this will help you understand
That's pretty easy to achieve with a pull model rather than push though, especially with modern technical advances Chesterton couldn't have dreamed of (search and ubiquitous internet). Under the backdrop of restraining advertising except insofar as it offers a legitimate discovery service, given how easy it is to operate such a service, is it still reasonable to populate websites, billboards, and magazines with intrusions into unrelated aspects of life?
In modern parlance, word of mouth is a form of marketing. Advertising is “an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea” [1]. (Also, word of mouth has strong incumbency bias. The printing press was revolutionary for a reason.)
> the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements
For example, this current comment advertises for Merriam-Webster's definition of advertising by calling attention to it.
There isn’t a single correct answer, because English. But in modern parlance, particularly in policy and commercial contexts, the paid part is key. “Word of mouth” encapsulates the difference: if they’re paid, they’re a spokesperson. If your friend pitching a product doesn’t disclose they’re paid, most would consider that dishonest.
Advertising that informs can be a net positive. Advertising that does anything else is a large waste of resources, IMHO.
i think a good way would be more markets. imagine "market-day" on a tech conference. everyone at a conference who is selling services in a room sitting at a table, and you can walk up to them if we are looking for some service.
It’s a relief to be free from the visual pollution billboards create and there are no downsides unless you own a billboard.
In a more urban setting, I don’t hate billboards. The absence of billboards is a definite increase in quality of life.
Possibly balanced out by general property value increases due to there being no billboards, but I kind of doubt it.
It is possible the stringent enforcement gets absurd ( see https://www.noozhawk.com/article/institution_ale_can_keep_it... ).
On balance I am in favor of banning most outdoor advertising.
https://mumbrella.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Ashley-M...
But what I find the worst these days are ultra-bright large LED screens. At night they are blindingly bright. One in particular in my area installed at a shopping plaza, is so bright I need to look away when walking by. Its "ad light" floods the whole area.
I could never get over how difficult it was to ignore that stupid billboard every time I crossed it.
That said, I do recognize that from the perspective of advertisers and consenting property owners having the (assumed) right to do trade however they wish, this may not be a fair or reasonable policy to enact. Truth be told, I haven't thought about this very much.
But the thing that I'm MOST interested in is what will be the secondary consequences of banning outdoor advertising? If advertisers cannot use billboards or posters, how will the space change and where will their behavior be compensated for elsewhere? Are there any unwanted secondary side-effects that might occur do to this prohibition? Like online advertising intensifying, or paid sponsorships for online content creators, or perhaps something completely different?
People ought to have a right to go, again, into public spaces and mind their business. They should be free to go about without being accosted or harangued or, for example, inconvenienced because people have chained themselves to the doors of commuter trains or have decided to lay in the middle of the highway.
Kind of the old 'your rights end where they interfere with my rights' kind of thing - going about my normal business in a public space is never likely to interfere with anybody, at least not in a purposeful way, whereas protests are by definition intended to interfere with my right to enjoy public spaces. They are, quite literally, intended to 'shock' normal people into changing their viewpoints or behaviour. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia) protests in the CBD often disturb private citizens in their homes.
I didn't ask for ad-blaring TVs to be in airport waiting areas.
In fact, both of those are worse than billboards. Billboards mostly don't move and talk.
You know what actually drives product innovation? Not being able to lean on advertising to drive sales, so you're actually forced to improve your product and get the benefit of positive word of mouth instead.
Yes, talking about or inserting something into conversation is promoting. It's advertising. And guess what--almost none of your users or buyers are going to say a word about your product.
People need to stop believing this stuff and just accept the dirty fact that if you want something to get used, you HAVE to advertise. You HAVE to promote.
Edit: You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.
Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.
You know what word of mouth is? Word of mouth is a signal you have already won. It is absolutely nothing for growth.
Once you've got some interest bootstrapped, you CAN in fact rely on unprompted word of mouth for growth. My users and buyers spread the word about my product simply because they find it useful. Many bring it to their new employer when they switch jobs.
So no, I disagree with the blanket position that you have to advertise -- especially in the intrusive fashion that's the subject of the article -- to get people to use your product. (Though I don't dispute that doing so can be a good shortcut.)
But all that is irrelevant to my claim above: my position is simply that a dearth of advertising options is what drives product innovation, by necessity. And hence, limiting advertising is likely to actually be good for consumers.
Bootstrapping only works if you haven't taken on much debt to finance the development and manufacturing of the product. Software can be developed with very little debt (which is what I did).
It is difficult to raise awareness for it. Newsletters, blogs, demo videos, presenting at conferences, etc. are all means for trying to spread the word. I have considered taking out some paid advertisements, but you wonder if anyone but bots will actually see them.
We don't expect a small company to be able to make a Hollywood movie, or a new medicine... and that's just fine, isn't it?
As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.
I use four big fat codebases (browser, OS, etc); maybe 10 decently-sized language runtimes like the JVM; and then 800+ rinky-dink CLI utilities. Half of which came from a Github Gist, or which I had to compile from source from a repo containing just some bare source files and no documentation. Yet many of these little CLI utilities individually take up just as much mental space as my browser or OS does; and I get just as much use out of them professionally as I do my browser or OS. (In fact often more, because many of these utilities are multi-platform, such that I use them regardless of which browser or OS I happen to be using.)
When I joined the company some years ago, we were the 5th largest in our sector. We since grew to 2nd largest using almost entirely word of mouth for sales. We didn't have any dedicated sales people, and did hardly any advertising.
Instead, users would call friends in the industry and tell them to get our software. If they switched jobs they'd persuade their new boss to get our software.
Since reaching #2 spot we got some sales and marketing people, and we're now at the top.
So while I'll disagree that word of mouth can't be used for growth, I've seen first hand how good sales and marketing can put you on a steeper curve.
Easy. This morning in the "Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?" thread I saw multiple users mentioning a open source project I have never heard of but seemed very close to what i was looking for. I have it now running since 12 hours and I already recommended a friend to check it out.
I reckon about 70% of things I use are from recommendations of people (but usually not from the internet). From what command-line shell I use to what music I listen to.
I don't recall seeing TikTok billboards or banner ads.
I've never seen a Tesla ad.
Did Facebook advertise? Instagram?
GMail throttled demand with limited invitations.
Until this week you had to apply to get a Dall-E login. Heard of it?
Rolls-Royce and Tupperware do not advertise.
I'm not saying advertising isn't important for products. But it's easy to find enormously-grown counterexamples to your blanket claim.
Tesla used to run billboards in LA and SF and paid influencers to shill their cars. They still market quite heavily today though not through billboards (AI Day is a marketing event.)
GMails invitation system was it's marketing, back in the day when people were excited about Google products.
Rolls Royce sponsors athletes, which is considered marketing. They also bring cars to auto shows and to various events targeted to the luxury crowd.
Tupperware's original business model was literally 100% about marketing. Most people would call it a multi level marketing scheme today.
For me the only advertising I see is on billboards because I never watch live TV either (and haven't for years). And many products are way too niche to advertise that way.
This group will get ever larger because it's just a great thing to live in an advertising-free world. If your business can't cope with it I would suggest making that a priority to adjust to :)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/286448/largest-global-ad...
You were telling someone that he's out of touch for thinking that he can sell a product on word of mouth alone. I'm providing evidence that he can sell a product through word of mouth because I bought his product based on word of mouth.
Whether or not you've also heard of his product is irrelevant. There's a near infinite number of successful products in the world that you've never heard of, so you being unaware of a particular product does not indicate anything about whether that product is successful.
No, but the two barber-shops in towns spending $X each on net-even advertising is a net-negative for me, because the only thing I get out of it is a higher bill when I cut my hair.
Some advertisement creates new markets. Some is a negative-sum game. None of it can be assumed to be honest, because of the obvious profit motive involved.
Who do you assume to be honest? The politician wanting your vote? The prospective employee telling you about his job skills? The public schools telling you they do a great job? Dr. Fauci? The customer who tells you "the check is in the mail"?
You can get all philosophical and start splitting hairs about what we can truly know, but whatever it is, I doubt I'll find it in an ad.
If advertising were toned down a couple orders of magnitude, word of mouth might actually get more traction.
Even if I leave room that advertising (and capitalism) is the only stable system, that doesn't mean it can't be limited and restricted for better outcomes for people on the whole.
I get if you're trying to starve for a buck out here in a crowded space like tech, but on the consumer side of things I have never put deep use in any product that was marketed (i.e. someone paid for it to get to my eyeballs.)
It may be true that for a bunch of you to make money, you need to put money in marketing. But for us who want good products, marketing mostly only gets in our way. Good products really do sell themselves with word of mouth, or me actively seeking out good things.
It's now one of the most successful games ever made. The advertising did nothing to hurt innovation, and in fact proved Rockstar's hypothesis that the market is ready for this kind of innovation, but needs to be sold on the idea.
The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.
This is misleading. Ad networks were defrauding Uber by generating fake clicks so such that organic installs of Uber would be attributed to these ad networks despite the install not being from an ad.
The problem was the ad networks and not advertising itself.
Those two notions aren’t the same, nor interchangeable. Advertising is about pushing something to a public and expanding the attention the product receives. “ There's no such thing as bad publicity” is advertising.
Promoting is about making a product’s (alleged)merits better known and enticing people to use said product for their benefit.
As a society, we want promotion, not advertisement.
Why don't you want to tell more people about it - wouldn't that help them? (and you?)
Seriously asking - like I get it if you only want to make $x and call it a day but can you help me understand why you wouldn't want to help more people with your superior offer?
So yes, it's certainly possible that advertising raises the overall well-being of the recipients, but it's by no means a given.
If you don't try to reach them - your inferior competitors will. Then you and your potential users are both worse off
I opt to keep growing
Imagine a small cake shop running a Superbowl ad. That'd be dumb, right? Even if they had the money to run the ad, they can't fulfill the number of orders that ad would generate.
Most companies do not and cannot "go viral"
that is a fantasy for most offers. Unfortunately it's just not that easy
There's a reason that millions of Americans work in some form of sales. At big, medium, and small companies of all types. It's not an accident or a mistake actually. Any offer worth enough profit to be worth a human pitching it will get pitched - and so too will many offers that aren't worth pitching for that matter
Per-unit-amortized CapEx costs, sorry. (Typo.) Think: labor acquisition costs when you're providing a high-touch service. You can only hire so fast. Or acquisition/expansion costs for facilities and capital equipment (factory mechanization), in the case of the small bakery. You can only make so many cakes per hour, by hand, in a room of a given size.
And it's 100% true. Look at any consultant. Look at any maker of artisanal goods. If you have "inelastic supply", then there is a certain amount of demand that is saturating, at which point you don't need any more demand — you only need better demand. Every customer you acquire from that point on replaces a lower-value customer on your fixed timetable. Untargeted outreach (advertising) does nothing to make that happen. You need targeted outreach (sales) at that point. Or just some very aggressive lead-qualification of your organic inbound traffic.
The reason a local bake shop doesn't do superbowl spots is because they're wasting their spend on millions of people who their offer is irrelevant to. I don't think it's because they can't scale up to fulfill
there could be local bakeshops that advertise on local tv or a billboard for example. But bakeshops don't usually make enough profit to justify these efforts
to further emphasize this point - there's no rule a company has to fulfill an order on their own. if you can't figure out how to fulfill - many companies will sub that work out/outsource it. the highest touch services - think biglaw partners - those type businesses don't really scale and are more jobs than actual businesses
> if you can't figure out how to fulfill - many companies will sub that work out/outsource it
Yeah, but if they're coming to you, specifically, it's probably not just because you've ran a superbowl ad, but also because you're offering something nobody else does offer, or is set up to offer, or even knows how to offer.
If you ran a superbowl ad for your little sandwich shop, that wouldn't make a million people interested in flying out to you to get sandwiches; your sandwiches are probably good, but so are many people's — there's no USP to what you're doing. Sandwiches are fungible-enough that the ad will just make people want a sandwich from their own local place.
But, well — you know the "pink sauce" lady? She's got a USP. You can't get pink sauce anywhere but her (for now.) And she's certainly trying to outsource her production to a big condiment corp, due to the massive accidental viral demand she's triggered for her product; but there wasn't anyone already set up to make pink sauce, so she couldn't actually just turn around and immediately buy it on the market, or subcontract its production (AFAIK there's no "condiments mixed to order" job-shop factory; only "we put your label on our pre-made condiments" factories.) Right now, she's just trying to meet millions of orders from all over the US, from her kitchen, and everything's going to hell as a result.
BMW doesn't really need to advertise as their new cars are only affordable for a small subset of the population. They advertise to re-enforce to their customers they made a great decision parting with their money.
Some things really don't need innovation.
New Coke was actually decently successful in the rest of the world; and especially in younger, more urban markets — i.e. the markets Pepsi is more popular in. New Coke did exactly what it was designed to do: steal market share from Pepsi.
Coke's mistake was never really in launching New Coke. Their mistake was in removing the "old" Coke at the same time. If New Coke was positioned differently — not as a replacement for Coke, but just as a "kind" of Coke (like Coke Zero is a "kind of" Coke), they would have cleaned up.
Growing up in Chicago's suburbs, the highways are awash in billboards. I never noticed it until living elsewhere. But in the town I grew up in, public ads were much less common.
It's interesting the ways in which the commercial exploitation of the visual environment plays out differently in different societies. But I'm a fan of far less advertising in public spaces, where you can't really consent. And I think it's interesting that the ways in which the internet attention economy lays bare the commodification of attention might bring more awareness of that mm dynamic in contexts where it has been underexamined.
I guess my point is this seems like a bunch of weakly-related data points, rather than a strong signal of a movement. Too bad, since I'd love to see drastically fewer ads in public spaces.
I drove in Scandinavia a few years ago. They have a lot fewer road signs. Speed limits are by default and drivers are supposed to know them: 50kph in town. 80kph on rural roads. 100kph on motorways. Only if limits are different are there signs.
The signs they do have are mostly iconic, so other than street names, you don't have to read words. That is also more pleasing to the eye somehow.
> This would also apply to the sides of buses, and on the London Underground and other rail and metro systems
This is a good point. The other arguments were much less persuasive.
Billboards in general, though? I live in a place with lots of billboards and they're pretty easy to ignore. I don't really see the upside here to what would constitute a freedom of speech/expression infringement.
I think the more reasonable emphasis should be on regulating the light escaping from a property, not micromanaging the property itself. Limit the lumens or whatever in various protected directions (into the sky, onto roadways, etc.) and that would address the entirety of the actually-valid concerns.
I’m not doubting your experience but that reminds me of when people say they browse the web without adblockers. Could it just be desensitization?
Marketing is a key component of building, growing and maintaining a business. There is no "build it and they will come". Many an interesting product has died on the vine because of poor or lacking marketing.
Marketing is a two-way street. It's about understanding who your potential customers are, how large your market is, who your competitors are, what is important to your potentiaal customers, who buys your products, why they buy them and so on. The other side, which includes advertising, is making people aware of your product or brand. It may include a direct call to action (eg "buy this widget now") or it may just be creating a perception for your brand. A lot of Coca-Cola and even Apple advertising falls into this category.
It's really disappointing to see some of the comments on this thread. Comments like "I built a business with no advertising so you don't need it either". The only way this is likely true is if you sell to a small number of businesses and your initial customers were former colleagues or otherwise known to you via networking. This is not representative of how business growth and marketing works and shouldn't be taken as such.
There can and should be limits on advertising. When, where, what, that sort of thing. I personally think that advertising in children's shows for example should be banned. So should pharmaceuticals (a uniquely US problem). Some things are understandably heavily restricted (eg gambling, alcohol, tobacco, cannabis).
But a ban on billboards? What does this achieve? The objections seem to be largely aesthetic. That seems highly performative.
From your perspective, you want to grow a business and become wealthy. That's fine, but why should we participate in that goal and tolerate a significant negative externality for very little reward? The idea that your business should be able to blot the public space for profit is a false premise, just one that people have grown used to for historical reasons.
How do you measure that even remotely accurately? It's certainly not as if there was some sort of confounding factor between then and now.
In the end I’m all for advertising money spent on ads that aren’t tracking me.
I’d switch the question around and ask: are there enough ads on billboards, bus stops? If not then maybe we haven’t regulated online ads enough to make the billboards attractive.
It's incredibly calming. And then it just becomes normal until you go to, say, Melbourne. And then it hits you in the face and good lord it's ugly.
Most of them are not being built in particularly scenic areas, and they add a lot of visual interest. Especially as a chronic user of public transit, I have SO MUCH appreciated having something to look at in a subway or bus stop. Each city and location has their own flavor, and it can actually be kind of fun to see what is in other cities/countries.
https://cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/n...
On the other hand online advertising...
This is another key differentiator: if I want to go anywhere, I have to pass billboards. The only other choice is to stay home. On the internet I can actually avoid bad sites.
For example, EasyList has this hide-element rule for Twitter:
twitter.com##.is-promoted
facebook.com##a[aria-label="Advertiser link"]
Just like your browser adblocker - you don't recognise noise & visual pollution until you live without it.
It's not just about the ads but resisting the deeper cancer of consumerism.
If you are worried about time being wasted, then don't interfere and carry on with what you consider important.
I think a compromise I could live w/ would be you can have outdoor advertising, but it has to just be a logo and a brand.
E.g., a giant sign with the coke logo is fine. But a sign that's basically clickbait w/ a dumb joke that you won't be able to avoid reading: absolutely not allowed.
Another example of outdoor advertising gone very wrong is in Monterrey, Mexico. It is a large city surrounded by gorgeous mountains, but in some places when driving can't even see them -- the road is just a wall of billboards. Very dystopian.
Billboard only serves for those who put it.
Better question, do you post to a site whose entire reason for being is to advertise startups it funded?
The answer is 100% yes, and we should ban other forms of advertising as well. Ban as many as possible.
However, I don’t try to justify it in any way (even though my current client is actually completely independent of ads). I know and agree that my contributions to that field are bad for society and try to do better whenever possible, including fighting back when my contractual obligations allow me to (and avoiding contracts that would prevent me to do so).
So not really a complete “dig” to the parent comment, but rather that we might have done wrong but we should strive to do better instead of trying to justify it.
IMO, it’s one thing to be involved in harmful advertising, it’s another to try and justify it. I don’t mind if you are involved because you have no other choice, but if you have other options, tired to unsuccessfully steer the ship around and you’re still there, then it’s where there’s a problem.
There is a 100% chance you are posting to a site whose entire reason for existing is to advertise companies that it has invested in.
Maybe the deeper problem is that living without enriching ad companies is a complex tax requiring research on everything you buy.
What then?
The problems still exist, still need to be dealt with. This is why it's not helpful to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or to focus on proving people to be hypocritical to shut down discussion.
Even a person who is perfectly willing to make all of the sacrifices for maximum consistency would find it extremely hard if not impossible to avoid helping ad companies, since these have grown so powerful and omnipresent like Google for instance.
I could also avoid any one of the other Big Tech companies without the loss of convenience. I could definitely avoid both of the Ad tech companies - Google and Facebook.
Before I get called out, I couldn’t just avoid 1 of the other three because they allow me to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. But if I didn’t work for them I could.
I agree that Hacker News should die.
This whole article reads like a dystopian mind-warp campaign of 'controlled influence' >>> "messy capitalist freedom promoting things we don't think is good for people". Who is we? People with university degrees having too much time on their hands because they got the useless ones?
"Let's ban flying ads, diesel car ads, gambling ads, burger ads, the masses can't be trusted, adds for veganism, social justice, yoga, and gym memberships? ... Well... sounds good! Let's have some of those!" The latter are of course fully informative, only have your best interests at heart, are not selling a lifestyle with brand imagery abusing decades of market research to push their product for financial gains?
I for one welcome our new ad-regulators. I definitely don't want to be victimized any longer by meaty burger-ads that make me fat and hurt the environment... /s
That being said: I'd like less ads.
As someone who uses an adblocker + noscript heavily, consumes next to no media (except books, old movies downloaded from the net), has no television, doesn't go to the cinema, doesn't follow the news, read magazines or have social media... really the only time I ever am exposed to ads might be outdoors. I'm sure they influence brand recognition without me noticing. I'd like less of them, but when someone argues for 'less ads... especially less of the wrong ones'... please go away from the hole you crawled out of and let people live their lives!
Ban them outright or take measures to limit their number indiscriminately of what they're about. Or don't, but don't impose your moral standards unto me and the world!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
Yes, this looks like the best world, can't wait for Google to implement it in Meta's metaverse.
How is removing ads from public space still a question?
Almost worse (as it is always for dumb ideas of this kind) is the enforcement. Are we going to have a whole system of definitions of what is billboard (when is it just a poster), jurisprudence, inspectors, etc. The kind of 0th order thinking of '"they" should ban X' has no relationship with reality, even if it sounds like a good thing if you dont think about it (personally I hate advertising) This is the same class of stupid idea that makes no practical sense that we see in various populist political campaigns
Edit: I have to admit, I didn't anticipate so many seemingly angry (and condescending - the guy talking about animal cruelty laws and "we encode complex things...", lol) replies. Anyway, the above is just my perspective, I guess if you want your tax dollars working towards something like this, there is a pathway to a billboard free future
The government literally tells people what to do on private property all the time. See zoning rules, smoking bans in restaurants, alcohol sales to minors, food safety laws, animal cruelty... the list is almost endless. I can't even fathom the kind of thinking that suggests that laws end on a property boundary.
> Are we going to have a whole system of definitions of what is billboard
Yes. It's not that hard. We encode complex things in regulations all the time.
That doesn't mean it's automatically a good thing.
If you want to argue that government shouldn't regulate billboards, fine, that's a valid argument. But the general principle of governments setting rules over private property is pretty well established, I would have thought.
Officially propagandised ideology is always the very "obvious" sea we swim in.
> This is the same class of stupid idea that makes no practical sense
Yet it happens, and it works, and it makes life better.
The whole point of billboards is that they are not private. If people want to put up billboards in their houses, godspeed.
The less the government messes with your freedom the better, eh? I suppose that if I didn't like the color, perhaps I'd repaint your house in retaliation. What a mess it'd all be.
My position is that visual pollution is not such a great concern that we should restrict how someone paints their building.
For example, if a world government said we don't want anyone wearing yellow hats. That's a problem because over the globe there are going to be some odd folks that care very much about their yellow hats (insert hypothetical religion / cause here). But if you get together with your neighbours and say let’s create a pact to legally require that all people remove their yellow hats from our gated community, well fine if you love yellow hats, you probably don't like these yellow hat haters anyway, who cares if they don't let you into their street.
That same could be done in local areas. But I think central business districts or areas that have a huge number of commuters there are just too many people involved. You now must have a lot more of a justification for the freedoms that are lost.
That said if all the building owners want to put that restriction in I'm all for it.
Besides, there is a perfectly libertarian or even ancap way of looking at the advertisement problem. Billboards affect the quality of a city, and most of the people it affects aren't getting paid proceeds. So they can gang up together to ask for a better deal. And if they can't then they are being restricted by some non-libertarian force.
You're correct about that, but not in the way you think. This site actually tends to lean more libertarian than most people in the real world.