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Comment by wpwpwpw | Hacker News Reader

Although it's not a very thoughtful article and manages to ignore the sheer number of people that today use the internet compared to even 10 years ago, I can myself relate to what's said. Old days internet was about communities and businesses ran by people with their own interests and products and servers, now it's tech giants and their networks ran by algorithms trying to milk and eat and replace those communities and businesses. I myself stopped using social networks and all of sudden I have nowhere else to interact. Sad.

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I wonder what the world would be like if we made it illegal to advertise on the internet.

It would turn the world upside down but probably in a good way.

My theory is that there will eventually be an 2nd dot bomb, as it's further demonstrated that targetted advertising doesn't actually get any better results than just advertising on subject matter related web sites...

If ads were just pictures with links they would be a lot harder to block too, but they just can't kick the drug habit of user tracking and metrics.

I think you're right, I think it's a huge bubble.

Galaxy brain: ban advertising everywhere, in all forms.

That seems like a slippery slope, as technically every comment on HN is advertising on behalf of the account owner.

Can you go a little further into this?

I want to know how you equate normal conversation to advertisement, because to me that seems like the linguistics version of moral relativism.

The dictionary definition of advertising, according to the OED excluding obsolete and rare usages, is:

" Verb

3. transitive. To give notice of (something); to make generally known.

4. a. transitive. To make generally known by means of an announcement in a public medium; spec. (a) to publish information about (a person (now rare), thing, circumstance, or event) so as to attract public attention; (b) to describe or present (a product, service, or the like) in order to promote sales. Frequently with by, in, on the medium specified (as a journal, radio, television, etc.). (Now the most common sense.)

b. intransitive. To publicize or promote something in this way.

Noun

2. a. The action or process of advertise v. 4; publication of an announcement in a public medium; (concrete) the result of this; advertisements collectively. Cf. self-advertising n. at self- prefix 1b(b).

b. The activity, trade, occupation, or profession of advertising or producing advertisements, now typically for a commercial product or service. "

I would argue that just because something fits into the definition doesn't mean the thing is what the definition claims it is.

When Plato gave the definition of man as "featherless bipeds", Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man"

I would limit advertising restrictions to (1) paid (2) indirect (3) commercial speech: any speech where you explicitly compensate a 3rd party to either include (alongside their own speech) or produce (i.e. to launder as their own speech—see homemade NordVPN adverts in YouTube videos, and essentially all "influencers" on IG) in order to affect commercial activity.

As a first party, you could of course be paid to produce any speech you want by the recipients of that speech (e.g. people can buy a book you write yourself, join your YouTube channel, etc.). You can also promote your own commercial activity (e.g. "buy my t-shirts" is allowed because it is direct).

Practically speaking, this would mean that, e.g. Procter and Gamble could promote Tide on their own website, but they couldn't pay anyone else to promote it. An individual could make a video about how much they love Tide, but PG couldn't pay them to make that video (or give them free product, discounts, etc. to induce them to make that video).

Businesses wouldn't be able to pay people to review products, or leave reviews on Amazon, etc.

Things PG could do: go around the country giving free laundry courses where they show people how to use Tide in the best way, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of using Tide vs. its competitors (buy they would not be able to advertise these events, of course, instead relying on word of mouth and their own website).

IMO, limiting advertising (as defined above) would dramatically improve the signal-to-noice ratio of the speech in the world, without limiting anyone's fundamental rights. If anything, it's normalizes the reach of everyone which enhances the positive benefits of free speech.

Ads provide the budget to make cool things happen. I would expect that it would further widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of inequality.

The internet used to have no advertising and cool things still happened and with no more barrier to entry than there is now

The internet also didn't have the traffic it does today, nor the storage or bandwidth demand. Once anything gets popular, scale becomes a problem without a significant budget.

Truely sad. And a perfect example of the damage that's been done.

Once people started calling typing to each other on the internet "community", it was basically over for actual community...

Now, you're pwn'd...

Why is it "not a very thoughtful article"?

You forgot the spam and the porn.

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