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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a good way to trap everyone with incumbent corporations.

No quitting your corporate job to start your own business, you’re not allowed to advertise.

You are conflating slapping ads in people's faces with making your business listed on the white/yellow/whatever pages and allowing people to find you without being a jerk.

That directory for tech would be like ProductHunt. Do you like it?

The yellow pages are ads, that's why for a while it was really hard to stop getting the phone company to stop leaving it as trash on your doorstep.

But we don't need paper these days. What I meant is to switch from being shown somewhat relevant ads while you try to do something else, to searching for relevant stuff whenever you truly need it.

Yellow pages, really? Like, let's ban ads and brig back yellow pages", and everything will be solved?

And, if you were not aware, how do you think Yellow Pages made money? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

Not that I think it's a good idea, but ...

You go to Google, type "refrigerator" and you get two buttons

* Please show me only adds, sorted by how much they paid to Larry and Sergey

* Please show me only somewhat organic results, sorted by relevance or whatever, and discount me $1 to pay for the servers and crawers.

Yeah, but serving that doesn't cost that much and dropping the advertisement platform would drop it further (and let engineers fix search instead of shaving milliseconds from ad bidding)

1. Yellow pages were paid ads

2. If a “directory” is the only advertising mechanism allowed it benefits the incumbents because incumbents are the only ones who have existing brand recognition. I don’t need a directory to know about Coca-Cola or Google Maps. You would have had to ban advertising at the dawn of time for this to work.

1. It makes sense that the business are the ones paying to get listed and vetted. We are now starting to need those blue checkmarks for a reason, some verification process is necessary, and then serving costs.

2. Why? You wouldn't search by business name, but by need. What about "nearby bakeries" or "pop soda" only benefits the better known brands? Indexing by name isn't the only way.

For #1 I think the idea basically violates the idea of banning advertising.

For #2, I think that established brands essentially wouldn’t need to be searched for.

In the status quo I can pay to put up a billboard next to McDonald’s and say “I make a better burger two blocks down.”

But if I’m not allowed to do that a lot of people will just assume that McDonald’s is the place to go for a fast food burger.

1. No, it puts people in control of when they query the index instead of spamming everywhere eyesight could possibly stare at.

2. That's fine, you want something new or something you don't know where to get? Query an index. You want the good ol' experience? Go for what you already know well.

If you worry about the people who would never discover anything new, then it's like they don't talk to anybody or have no desire of changing anything, but that's their decision.

What if the “good old experience” is Microsoft in the late 1990s with a nearly 100% marketshare? You don’t know anyone who uses another system and you assume that all other options either don’t exist or can’t possibly be as good. There’s almost zero word of mouth and you haven’t bothered to consult a directory since you’re 100% confident that the only operating system in the world is Windows [1]

Do you not recognize how this scenario can work to preserve monopolies?

How does Apple come back from the brink of bankruptcy without their iconic iMac and iPod marketing campaigns?

And how do you flip the switch to making advertising illegal when incumbent companies have already enjoyed the benefit of legal advertising for hundreds of years? We ban advertising, and I start my new soft drink company, but Coca-Cola got to advertise for 100+ years already. The cat has been out of the bag for thousands of years.

[1] https://www.overclock.net/threads/teacher-calls-linux-%E2%80...

So are we stuck with vi because vim, neovim, and helix had no spam budget?

Non-commercial software that started as a personal project isn’t really a good example. There’s no development or manufacturing cost.

There could be an index where you list your product/service, so people can find your stuff when they need it. But yeah will be harder to manipulate people to buy your miracle supplement or other garbage that is 99% of the current ads I see. I do not watch Tv, use ad blockers so after years of not watching TV I watched a bit recently and most ads are supplements/"naturists medicine" and for some reasons on youtube without the ad blocker they always show me the same ad over and over again(it is funny Google is trying to sell me the product from the company I work for, and somehow showing me same ad each day would convince someone to eventually try something they are not interested in)

> showing me same ad each day would convince someone to eventually try something they are not interested in

* not interested in right now.

Showing the same ad to the same person (or cohort of people) works. Eventually, someone in the cohort may be interested in that product/service at some point in their lfie and they are more likely to pick a brand they are familiar with. They are now familiar with that brand after having seen it everywhere all over their internet browsing, sometimes for months or years at a time.

Yeah. Don't want that. Of course it works, but so does drugging people. Doesn't mean it needs to be allowed.

When I want it, ill initiate a fresh search and find whatever I find, at that time. Don't want things leeching into my subconscious just because you want it to be your brand that I use later.

What’s your stance on signage on physical brick and mortar businesses? Logos on products? Where should we be drawing this line? And who benefits most from that line being drawn?

If it's their shop, it is fine. If it's their product, it is fine. Anywhere else, not fine. Even then, it should only be visible as I come close to the place, none of the obnoxiously massive billboards.

It's the same online, you can fill your own website, or your slot on the "yellow/white pages equivalent" alluded to by GP, with whatever crap you want.

> Where should we be drawing the line

Anything without explicit initiation from the user is not allowed. If I walk in front of your shop, cool, show me your ad. If I am 500m away, don't put up a fucking 5x5m billboard 40ft in the air. If I open your website, or scroll past your slot on an aggregator, cool, show me your logo, otherwise, nope. If I s/scroll/stroll past your s/slot/shelf in the s/aggregator/groceryshop then show me your logo, otherwise, nope. There are maaaaybe a few exceptions to the rule, like on highways I'd be fine with seeing $restaurant 8km away, or whatever, but those are rare situations where you benefit from knowing ahead of time, and even this is not necessary with google maps.

>so people can find your stuff when they need it

And how do are people informed about new products they may need or changes to existing products that they now may need? What about reminding people about things they needed, but they forgot about? There needs to be someway for companies to reach consumers that isn't initiated by the consumer.

When I want it, I will start a search and find something new. I don't need constant bombardment with brands "I forgot about".

This leads to inefficiency in the market. Again you don't know when you want "it", when you don't know that "it" even exists. This gives an advantage to incumbents in the market since you already know of them.

I'll take the risk.

> There could be an index where you list your product/service, so people can find your stuff when they need it.

There is already one, it's called a search engine.

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