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Comment by FrankWilhoit | Hacker News Reader

Advertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.

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There are two kinds of advertising. I will call them "scarcity advertising" and "abundance advertising".

Scarcity advertising is, for example, "Joe's grocery now has cantaloupes" (back in the day when cantaloupes were not available all year). It's information - something is now available that wasn't available before.

Abundance advertising is, for example, "The Chevrolet SomeHotCar will give you an exciting life like the people in this ad. Don't you want that?" As someone put it (wish I remember who, I would give credit): "[This kind of] advertising attempts to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you."

The first kind of advertising is useful. The second is abusive.

Usually the second type is called “brand advertising”. The idea is to create a positive association with a brand and not expect you to take any immediate action. The first type maybe “action advertising” (I’ve heard other terms).

Most advertising is actually the first type.

Assuming you mean "conversion advertising" vs "brand advertising", what I remember looking at industry-wide numbers when I worked on Google Ads was that they're actually pretty close, with brand advertising being slightly bigger. Something like 60/40 industrywide.

Now, it varies widely depending on the medium, search ads lean way more on conversion advertising, with display and especially video ads leaning more on the brand side.

Brands are bullshit. I'd actually be on board with the conventional capitalism view of producer-consumer information levels if brands went away. They distort quality, they distort product perception, they don't have anything to do with the actual reality of most people. “Consumption styles as part of personality” (aka brands) are a cancer.

> The first kind of advertising is useful.

What utility does the first sort of advertising have? At best it seems non-abusive, but it still clogs up our brains with crap we don't need and didn't ask for.

Unless you like cantaloupes.

If advertising was for my benefit it would be optional.

I miss brochures ...

I have run hundreds of millions in advertising dollars for dozens of companies. The vast majority of ad spend is the former category.

I think you need to explain some more, because that's not what I see around me.

How about an ad (assuming an honest product, since this thread is clearly about ads as such) in a remote village saying "get a work visa to Europe/US, you could live like these people with higher living standards!"

People who were quite happy being subsistence farmers are now aware, or much more aware, of the possibility of higher living standards. Doesn't seem immoral to me. Why would a car ad be immoral then? Perhaps it will improve the average purchasers life? I say it someone who is quite happy with a 15yo Honda Fit :)

Is the first kind of advertising useful? It seems like there are better ways to obtain that information, like, for example a search. The benefit being that I only am presented with that information if I actually need/want cantaloups

I do appreciate the first kind. I want to know what Lidl has on offer this week, but I don't care about searching their website about specific products.

> You have cantaloupes? Oh, okay, I forgot it was the season.

> I'd be happier and more actualised if I owned your car? No, to hell with your manipulation of who I should aspire to be.

I don't feel like I'm particularly harmed by forgetting cantaloup season. I don't generally forget that products exist if my life is actually improved by them in any meaningful way.

You know what I do forget? What I was doing before you decided to "remind" me of your shit product in the middle of me trying to complete a task.

But now I want a cantaloupe and beforehand I didn't, and I'm slightly less happy and satisfied with this lack of cantaloupe that I now viscerally feel.

Whilst I'm at the grocery store is the appropriate time to work out that cantaloupe is an option.

Not in the middle of watching a cricket match.

Is this satire? Does merely seeing a picture of a cantaloup on a shelf harm your psyche? Sure, if it's a model holding them up to her chest saying "come get my melons" i can understand that might qualify. But i don't see how "joe's has cantaloup again" would make you feel literally anything unless you already wanted cantaloupe, in which case the notification was beneficial in _allieving_ a negative emotion and not creating one.

I admit that the line gets very fuzzy at a certain point but i think we can agree that the extremes are different things.

Semi-satire. Three quarters.

It kinda depends on how much of a craving item it is. Fruits and veg, no worries ;)

There are two kinds of advertising. One kind slaps you in the face at the least expected moment. The other kind is like the yellow pages which you open whenever you need something.

We could always allow opt-in advertising (“send me your monthly/weekly/whatever catalog”) and ban the unsolicited kind. This could extend to asking for things like trade magazines or email newsletters or what have you.

Useful kind preserved, evil kind squashed.

What a great way to put it. I went looking and it’s from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.

> The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch7

Advertising is just a subset of a larger medium. It's a fully generic channel. Psychological manipulation is abusive and is often the tactic used by advertisers in order to see a return on their advertising spending.

I feel this means you can have ads, but, you really do need a large scale entity intelligently policing them or the tendency will constantly be towards abuse. On the balance, it is probably more efficient to just ban them, but many nations recognize the right to free speech and have arrived at the conclusion that advertising is included under that umbrella.

So, we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive, and legally risky, such that the volume of them decreases dramatically.

> So, we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive, and legally risky, such that the volume of them decreases dramatically.

i.e. those with lots of money get a lot of ad time and no one else gets any. I can think of a number of ways why this is inadvisable, across multiple axes, social, economic, and political.

Advertising is not particularly expensive as it is, go look up the "rate card" for your favorite broadcaster, even if you increased those rates by an order of magnitude they would still be approachable by most clients. You would also expect that if the cost of ads go up then the number of "avails" for them would go down.

Collective industry groups would advertise more and politicians would advertise a lot less.

> Advertising is not particularly expensive

I'm sure it's not expensive right now, but I was extrapolating the likely outcome from your hypothetical:

>> ... we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive

A poor choice of words. They're so cheap now advertisers can spam the channel. That's the behavior you want to prohibit, not overall access, which again, even facing an order of magnitude increase, would still be viable.

The conclusion that every government came to after Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion" is that the society who can be arbitrarily manipulated by propaganda is better because it's something like adding a rudder to a rudderless ship.

If democracy is predicated on independent thought and decision (free speech, free vote), then the "rudder" in this analogy becomes authoritarianism with an additional step.

Yes, I am not advocating for it. Just pointing to the historical moment when the insight became concrete enough to deploy. The propaganda arm of the modern economic apparatus is -literally- The Matrix. The political / economic theories that inspired The Matrix are works like Society of the Spectacle which express exactly what you just said in extreme detail; that whoever has control or even just a significant influence over the images and words that move through peoples' minds in effect has them enslaved in a form of Panopticon.

Except foreign powers can also control that rudder.

Society has a rudder. You couldn't claim a society exists _without_ one. It's a defining characteristic.

What society doesn't have is a _fast_ or particularly responsive rudder. It moves slow and hates capricious changes. It frustrates capital which wants to move quickly and change as often as is needed to derive greater profits.

They're not manipulating you for your own good. They're doing it for money.

As I said elsewhere, Yes, I am not advocating for it. Just pointing to the historical moment when the insight became concrete enough to deploy. The propaganda arm of the modern economic apparatus is -literally- The Matrix. The political / economic theories that inspired The Matrix are works like Society of the Spectacle which express exactly what you just said in extreme detail; that whoever has control or even just a significant influence over the images and words that move through peoples' minds in effect has them enslaved in a form of Panopticon.

This comment feels like you're trying to replace my own perception and judgement about advertising with your own. Are you committing psychic violence by trying to persuade me?

Honestly, I don't see why advertising is any more abusive than any other unsolicited opinion or attempts at persuasion by people one sees in every day life. It is far easier to ignore a billboard than a protest or a beggar or an evangelist.

Advertising is mostly carried out by for-profit institutions, using techniques that abuse or take advantage of the human mind, and at a significant scale. If you can't distinguish evangelism from modern-day advertising, then right now I'm also committing psychic violence.

By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?

classifieds, directories, that sort of thing

That's advertising.

A directory is no more advertising than a database is.

Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.

It's more like a phone book

Organic searches and word of mouth.

They wouldn't. That's the beauty of the plan; it's a feature not a bug.

Certainly not through conventional advertising. There's heaps of billboards where I live, and I'd have a very hard time finding one for a shop/service/political party/business that hasn't been around for years.

Meanwhile Maine banned them decades ago and it turns out the world doesn't end and you can still find ambulance chasing lawyers and weird cults just fine.

Hell, one of our best known lawyers in the entire state is a freaking injury liability one.

But hey, direct evidence of lack of harm never seems to stop all the cockroaches coming out of the woodwork insisting that the world fails if we can't have our eyeballs sold to the highest bidder at every second, and that a different world is just impossible. Gee, I wonder if those people are just ignorant, or maybe have some motivated reasoning, like if most of them were paid entirely by advertising revenue.

Something something hard to get a man to understand something...

The small city of São Paulo (~22M people) has also banned billboards since 2007, and life goes on.

Search. If they are interested, they will look for your thing.

Search what? Anything they find, is likely to be considered advertising.

A review is not an ad (unless they were paid to make it). Reviews and other publications are a pretty good way to find whatever you're looking for.

Word of mouth is not advertising. What your friends like is something you might like too.

Catalogue listings and databases are not advertising. You can search those for terms closely associated with what you're looking for.

The internet is more than just ads.

We can argue back and forth about the specifics but there is no denying we are way too far in the wrong direction currently. Buy a car? The dealership slaps their name on it. Every screen at every stage bombards you. Radio, music streaming, ads everywhere. Billboards, benches, bus stops, it never stops. I still occasionally see those tacky trucks with bright ads displayed on them just driving around.

A cursory search shows that the average person is exposed to ~5000 ads a day in the US. Everyone is screaming for your attention. It's not healthy.

We replace push advertising (unsolicited messages) with pull systems (discoverability on demand).

Discoverability is a very difficult challenge, especially for small niches. Many customers contact my employer, saying that they didn't know our products existed (and many products have existed in some form for >10 years). If you can find a way to improve discoverability, you would be a hero to many niche businesses.

I truly don't care. I would much rather miss out on hearing about a few genuinely-desirable products due to poor discoverability, if the payoff is that I don't have to suffer the deluge of imposed advertizing I never asked for.

Do you have any non-feeling based thoughts to contribute? I see your comment as being non-constructive, as you have not presented any new information or thinking.

On the contrary, you haven't explained why discoverability matters, or why any of us should care. You just take it as a given that it justifies the means. I believe that is what the poster above is pointing out.

They just gave you a potential customer's perspective. The fact you wrote this off as uninteresting is telling.

Thats like saying i dont care if i have to rub the product in your face as long as you buy it it is fine with me.

I've got mine jack!

lol

"non-feeling based thoughts"

Fake

I would agree, that I would rather not suffer imposed advertising I did not ask for even if missing out some products.

However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.

(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)

Okay, thw question then becomes: How do we get people to deliberatly look?

Say I have this stunning webshop with margins smaller than bezos toilet breaks. How do I survive out there in the jungle?

> Okay, thw question then becomes: How do we get people to deliberatly look?

You don't. Because you don't get to manipulate my attention. That simple.

Exactly this. You can put information in a place that motivated consumers can find it. Heck, you could _even_ pay for it to be there, or to be prioritized there, if you want (I don't love that, but I don't have a coherent way to prevent it). But you should _not_ get to inject your information into my life.

Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.

I think I (mostly) agree with you, but it seems like SEO and search in general would be even more distorted if outright advertising were disallowed or penalized.

It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.

Yes, I agree that (on and off-line) advertising does seem to be unnecessarily expensive (across the economy), but valuable 'advertising placements' are scarce, and I'm not sure how else they could be allocated.

In the 90s I would spend my money buying a magazine called computer shopper when to wanted to shop for computer parts.

That’s opt in advertising.

But you as the advertiser is not happy with that

There is absolutely no reason to think that advertising makes discoverability of desirable trades more likely, and every reason to think it makes it worse. The people best equipped to spend a lot on ads are those who are offering the worst deal (giving them the best margins). That's without even getting into ads that are used to manipulate people into wanting to make obviously bad choices, e.g. ads for soda, candy, fast food, alcohol, gambling, pointless plastic garbage, etc.

Catalogs, the kind used in the '80s for electronic components. Yellow pages.

Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.

They can put their information where it can be found easily by people who are interested-

That's advertising.

No, advertising is putting information in peoples faces as much as possible even if they are not interested at all.

It's solicited advertising. Something I don't think almost anyone has a problem with.

Unsolicited advertising is what everyone hates.

If I go onto my grocery store website and see "we have a sale on xyz" I'm not bothered because I went to that website to see what they have. I'm also not bothered by sales displays in the store. All forms of acceptable advertising.

But what I absolutely hate is navigating a webpage unrelated to my store and seeing "Did you know you can buy widgets at your local store!" or watching youtube and seeing an unskippable 30 second ad for my store. Or getting a newspaper that is actually just 90% advertisement with 2 paragraphs of actual news.

Can you give an example of "solicited advertising"? I have never heard of such a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.

You search for “Canon cameras” and a search result ad shows you where to buy a Canon camera in your area.

Excellent example. Others might include grabbing a brochure for a car or visiting a product webpage (like an iPhone page).

I see - thanks for the explanation. I try to filter out those sorts of ads too, because I don't want my decisions to be biased by the money someone else spends, but they certainly are less annoying than the usual sort.

I wonder whether you would consider ads for fashion houses in a fashion magazine to be "solicited" or "unsolicited"?

> Can you give an example of "solicited advertising"? I have never heard of such a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.

The only thing I would consider solicited is when I decide that I want to see product information. Everything else is just some chapter from the narcissists prayer: "and if I did, it wasn't that bad"

Have you really never bought a product or service for some other reason than that you saw an ad for it?

People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.

Friends and family can be influenced, although I'd still trust them above anyone else. But salespeople are incentivized to lie to you (sorry, it's true). Product reviews are astroturfed by bots now. Consumer Reports, too, has been captured by industry, and is largely useless now.

When the metric is "make sales and make as much money as possible", it will be incredibly difficult to avoid bias from people with a vested interest in selling you something. This is why advertising (admittedly, mixed with our current society) is so insidious: it's very hard to find a third party that isn't trying to profit off of you buying something.

> Consumer Reports, too, has been captured by industry, and is largely useless now.

Any evidence of this?

video game "journalism", car magazines, travel reviews, restaurant reviews

So, no? Just naming a few of their products isn't evidence.

Currently I think it is difficult to argue that advertising in its most visible forms have any serious benefit to people looking to obtain a service.

How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.

The highest margins buy the most advertisements.

Word of mouth. If you make happy customers, they'll readily tell others.

But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.

A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.

Eeyup. Costco does zero advertising, and yet everyone knows about Costco. Why? Because they're good. In reality, the prices don't always work out, but they have so many other nice things: opticians, tires, a food court (with loss leaders!), rotisserie chicken (also a loss leader), solid products, etc. Costco exists to make money, sure, but it doesn't feel like they're trying to screw you. I can't say that about 99.9% of companies now.

> Costco does zero advertising

What is the monthly magazine they send me, then?

I don't know.

Membership magazine.

> By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?

In my opinion, it would take quite a lack of imagination to ask such a question.

There's many many ways to reach people who want your product. Industry-relevant news publishers and conferences, professional/personal anecdotes (eg, blogs and recommendations), demonstrations and training offers, etc.

A different question would be: by what other means would businesses force their products on people who don't want them? Hopefully the answer is: none.

Maybe these means should be employed in more moderation?

Certainly we wouldn't be better off if advertising were beamed 24/7 at full blast into your ears and eyes the second you step out into any public space.

About 5% of its current proliferation would be a nice target to aim for - maybe a maximum of 200 ads a day[1] - but if that still proves to be an issue, we could always go lower.

---

[1] With maybe five rising to the level of notice.

Catalogues

Free samples or in-store demonstrations like we used to.

That's advertising.

Why is this getting down voted?

Because it's low-effort and borderline bad faith.

Because it assumes (in bad faith) that intrusive advertizing is the only way for motivated consumers to acquire information.

Personal recommendations. Why would you trust someone with a pecuniary interest in selling you something?

Sounds like someone else's problem, mine is "I don't want to see your ads".

Acceptable ad: "I write code. If you need code, consider me because [short list of objective attributes about myself, related only to coding]." posted somewhere people looking for people to code go to find people to code. Consciously put there by someone that can be held accountable for choosing to post it. Doesn't evoke strong emotions, especially fear or hate, through barely related stories and imaginary. Doesn't contain any trackers.

Unacceptable ad: Everything seen everywhere.

Yes, that would be an example of an acceptable advertising, and is better than what they usually do too much instead.

I have never, even once, bought a product or chosen a brand based on advertising (of course you can point to subconscious conditioning, but that would not support the point you're making).

I’ve bought hundreds of products from ads. Most of them I wouldn’t have known about if not for the ads. And I’m pretty happy with all those purchases.

Look everyone, we found one!

Great. So set your agent to “show me adverts” and let the rest of use set our agents to “don’t show me adverts”.

Then we come to the rub: if "don't show me adverts" suddenly made common tasks (checking email, using a search engine) cost a bit of money, how many people would go for that?

Hard to tell, as those 2 specific services are currently monopolized by a company who refuses to offer those specific services ad-free

Email certainly isn’t monopolised! I can think of at least 3 mainstream search engines - although all advert driven

Quite a few. Hence people who pay for Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Certainly I don’t have adverts when I check my email, does Hotmail etc do adverts now? I’m sure they didn’t back in the early 00s.

Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads.

YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!

We built computers to store information and make that information searchable. Imagine! The place that sells stuff has a list of things...that you could search through...using a computer. Since you have to sell things somewhere, I am pretty sure the people selling them might put them in the place where people search for them.

Sure - NOW. Growing up in the 80s? How did you FIND things? For example, a shop willing to install random non-OEM car part for me? I had to hunt through the yellow pages, cold-call a bunch of places, etc.

My parents are STILL in that mind-set - TV "tells you" about stuff - and TV never lies!!

They're seeing more and more advertising during their "shows". And sadly, becoming more and more susceptible to it as they age - like the thousands of dollars of "apocalypse food buckets" they bought from some televangelist. Most of which they had to leave behind when they moved into the retirement community (ignoring the rationality of buying it in the first place).

You had to call a shop that you suspected had the thing and ask them? Sorry for the mocking tone, but yes, I did that too in the 90s. And then they might hold it for you! Or they could order it over the phone for you.

Sometimes you could also talk to people in a shop about what you were really trying to accomplish and they'd give you advice on what you might need or how you could do it.

Everyone knows it was impossible to run a niche business before 2006 when Google thankfully shoved irrelevant advertisements in the way of everything we wanted to do!

There definitely wasn't prior art of entire industries building themselves up out of nothing by making something that was self evidently good and selling it to like five turbo nerds who made sure everyone they found wanted it.

That industry is definitely not for example the software services industry before about 2000, and there definitely isn't a huge trove of examples of literally two guys in a garage building software, sometimes mediocre software, and selling it to niche businesses.

That's definitely not the, like, founding narrative of our entire sector of the economy or anything.

There definitely wasn't such a thing like trade magazines where you could browse a vague and generic interest and find all sorts of awesome and expensive and niche products to buy for your hobby, like low production run test equipment or literal scams built by weird guys in a garage, again.

China definitely doesn't have a clear current example of a huge industry that runs basically from a bunch of guys with a box of junk in a stall in a giant physical building that westerners literally go to as a niche tourist destination that drives a bunch of niche product development.

No no, we definitely need to let Google rewrite the very words in front of your face to sell you whatever the highest bidder wants to sell you. How else could you possibly find things?

Ideally none at all. They aren't entitled to my attention. I disagree with the very premise of this question.

I believe that's the wrong angle to be looking at it since you're starting from the perspective of someone trying to sell something.

The 'need' end is the perspective that's most useful to society. How can someone who has a need find out to satisfy it?

Make your product able to be found by those who need it. Don't shove it in the faces of everyone.

One problem with the above is the effectiveness of making 'unnecessary' sales by creating fomo by shoving it in the faces of everyone. This effectiveness, however, is evidence of the fact that it's psychological manipulation / abuse.

> Make your product able to be found by those who need it.

I think you'd need to more directly and clearly define "need." Do you mean only utilitarian companies and products should exist? What about the things I don't "need" but just "like?" What about music? How do I find new music? How do I know I like something before I've even discovered it? Should music radio, which is just an abstract form of album advertising, not exist at all?

I'm torturing the point, but outside of centralized market control, I'm not sure you can apply this logic across the entire scope of capitalism.

Wild to be in the age of free reach across multiple social media platforms and be unaware how to sell a product/service without advertising.

> By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?

Easy: provide informational material. I will fetch it if/when I'm interested. Don't stick it up my nose while I try to do something else

> A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright

Western society would cease to exist if it didn't continue its diabolical lies, falsehoods and abuse. The lies are not optional.

It is because of pragmatic regard for survival of the status quo that the lies do continue. That word 'pragmatic' is what keeps diabolical people from seeing themselves for what they are.

You say that like western culture is the worst here?

Where is it better? Russia? Where stating that a war is a war can get you in prison? China, where historical events, like 1989 at tianamen square are wiped out? North Korea where everyone cheers up to the beloved genius leader?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...

Can we not critique something without whataboutism? We're not talking about China or Russia, where presumably scant few HN contributors live.

The topic is advertising. As of my knowledge, happens all around the world.

So .. why single out "the west" here like this in the first place?

Because western society, especially the American flavor, sees every ad as sacrosanct and necessary for the planet to keep on spinning, while the mere suggestion that maybe we don't need billboards is met with disproportionate vitriol. I mean, someone elsewhere suggested that it would upend the economy if people couldn't shove their marketing copy in your face 24/7. Oh, imagine the horror!

Hacker News also has a, largely, American audience, so we ought not to pretend that we're not mostly talking about America and the west when we have these discussions. "But what about China?" I don't care, I don't live in China, most people here don't live in China. I have a laundry list of criticism of China, but something tells me we're not talking about China.

Advertisement works pretty much the same, whether in the west, as well as the east ( whatever those terms mean anyway). So I would rather like to talk about advertisement in general, how we as humanity can maybe move past it. How to fund online services in a different way, instead of advertisement. Venting about how all is shit, I see as not so productive in making any progress here.

Because we strive to be good and justified and beneficial to all peoples.

There are so many opportunities in the next few decades to set good examples for the world over.

I imagine slave owners who didn't abuse their slaves felt quite righteous and even superior to other slave owners.

Where is it better? Who treats slaves better than I do, they'd say.

Depends on the time, but since europe got rid of slavery way earlier than US, the question would have been easy to answer.

Stating that a particular ongoing genocide is a genocide can get you in quite a bit of trouble under "western culture".

I'm not so sure China or DPRK are as different as you make them out to be, and if you've got a point, I'm not so sure it will last more than a few years.

A touch dramatic, chap.

I strongly disagree. Hearing an ad makes me a little miserable/angry almost instantly, without even the context of the ad yet. They are one of the major categories of corporate mistreatment of humans, which together are the #2 most hideous by-design facets of our civilization, after war ("by-design" meaning to the exclusion of illegal activity).

I find it surprising that more people aren't dismayed at how many advertisements we are being exposed to daily. I think that once you're used to it, you don't feel much concern about it, but when you manage to cut a lot of them out (e.g. I have a pi-hole filtering a large portion of ads in my whole home) it becomes extremely upsetting to be dropped back into a place where they are everywhere.

Few things upset me as much as driving around a beautiful place and having billboards plastered up and down the highway. A few states have come to their senses and banned them.

The issue as a whole is that it genuinely is eroding the human experience. Being alive in a world where your eyesight is real estate to be filled with images that are meant to leave you with negative emotions with the intent of taking your money from you is bleak.

>I find it surprising that more people aren't dismayed at how many advertisements we are being exposed to daily.

Click through users' profiles here and see where they work.

I don't often watch live/terrestrial TV. On the odd occasion I do, I'm taken aback. I forget how frequent, jarring, and obtrusive they are. And in recent years, it seems that gambling ads are more and more common. It's really quite astonishing.

Many people have TV on in the background all the time. I wonder if there's correlation between a "ads aren't so bad" and TV watching.

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