Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

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> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

So that would exclude:

- listing your house, or car in the classifieds

- buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts)

- buying a garage sale sign

- buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale

- paying a realtor to sell your house

- paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product.

- distributing a catalog

- paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product

Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment?

And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses.

To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.

It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.

Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:

- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.

There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.

Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.

But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.

> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.

Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.

Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.

Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.

Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising

etc…

Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.

> Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.

According to the definition given, if the intent is to "promote a product", and money changed hands it is.

It also meets websters definition of advertising:

> the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements

Exactly. You're paying a realtor to promote your house, including on their site, to sell it.

Zero difference from hiring a TV channel to promote your product, on their channel, to sell it.

Which is why trying to define advertising in a way that bans it is not simple at all.

GP says "Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising."

OK. Now the realtor adds a blog. They start publishing news about the real estate business. With listings mixed in. Congrats, you've got a newspaper with ads for homes. Are you ready to say the realtor can't publish news? Isn't that censorship?

Also, home listings aren't "factual". They're promotional. They focus on pros and omit cons. They have photos that hide the ugly parts. They're ads for homes, period.

Surely there is a difference between me (private person ) selling my 1 car/house or company Y advertising their latest car model (they want to sell 1000ds).

Yes, there's a difference in the number of items you're selling.

There isn't a difference in terms of the fact that it's advertising a sale. Nor is it relevant if you're doing so personally, as a sole proprietor, as a partnership, as an S corp or as a C corp. Advertising something for sale is advertising something for sale. Ads are ads.

Also, on the realtor's site they're listing hundreds of homes. Not any different from your local car dealership advertising their hundreds of vehicles. They're both corporations listing ads.

Advertising is advertising.

There is absolutely a difference. Multiple differences in fact. But the difference isn't "one is an ad, and the other isn't".

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