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Comment by spain | Hacker News Reader

You're right. That was actually a bad example, I admit. A better example would be the bottle of soda that you might see on a store shelf.

I've updated the reply.

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The bottle of soda is still an ad. Before brands advertised via their products you'd just get "a bottle of lemonade", it would perhaps have a label on that says "lemonade" [well you'd probably make your own ...] - but the bottle shape and colour, logos, label styling, images are all part of an advert that reinforces a specific brand identity.

Yes, if you want to buy a specific brand you'd need to modify the filter. I'd like it to say pick out the "cheapest lemonade that has lemon in it and no aspartame and scores at least 50% in taste tests" or "the lemonade I drank last time" and just show me that one at my behest!

I'd still like a label that allows me to determine the difference between bottles of mineral water, soda water, tonic water, and lemonade.

The software would just need to add a generic label text like "soda" on top of the blur effect - when it detects the brand, it knows the type already, and it can just do an n-to-1 mapping so that you can buy, say, an orange-flavored soda without seeing which brand you took.

Still, even within type there's great variance. Coke and Pepsi are both colas, but whereas in the US they taste fairly similar, they're very different here in Australia (our coke is like mexican coke, made with sugar instead of HFCS). The inconvenience of being exposed to branding is overshadowed by the inconvenience of accidentally selecting a product you know you don't like.

Simple advertising like branding on the product itself isn't the problem, anyway. It's usually not intrusive nor irrelevant to what you're doing. If you're looking at the bottle, chances are that you want to do something with it. It's not like you're driving down the road and the bottle forces itself into view like a billboard. It would be better if this form of adblocking could somehow detect if the branding was actually attached to the product and let that through, since it does double duty as branding and identification.

More useful would be an infographic that showed ingredient quality info, sugar/caffeine levels, generic flavor symbol, environmental impact etc.

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