I’ve had adblockers on my browsers for years and pay for ad-free streaming. I easily went over a decade without seeing an ad on a screen in my own home. But when I’d go to a restaurant that had TVs (or to my mom’s house where she’d run the TV constantly) I’d marvel at how unwatchable it was. Just a constant interruption.

My wife has a friend who produced a TV series for Tubi and so we signed up to check it out and, wow. I had to tap out of watching it because of the ads. Just completely obnoxious and loud.

Let’s ban all persuasive advertising! No reason not to let people make a list of features or something, like a notification, but that’s it.

How exactly do you define advertising? An overly broad definition would forbid, for example, a dentist from putting a sign in front of their office saying they’re a dentist.

all business would fail.

Then we’d have a centrally-planned economy I guess. I don’t really see how a free market would work without advertising.

#YES, PLEASE.

I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:

• I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
• I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
• I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
• The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
• Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
• Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.

It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.

Ultimately some ads will become illegal as legit advertisers (large corps), get pissed off at all the dick pill ads mixed in with their content.

I see advertising as a necessary evil. It helps small businesses take off and stay afloat (especially when alternatives for being funded aren’t viable for them), but at the same time it basically promotes corporate greed by shoving ads down our throats.

Abolishing advertising entirely would be improbable. I just want it to be toned down to the point where we’re all comfortable with it. Too much of a good thing inevitably becomes a bad thing. But too little of a good thing is also a bad thing. So things should be taken in moderation. In the case of advertising, the first statement applies; there’s way too much of it, it’s really in-your-face and disruptive, and we’re all getting sick of it.

The thing is I don’t think I would mind advertising if it wasn’t shoved down my throat 24/7. The fact I can’t read a webpage without ads blocking everything, I can’t watch TV without more than half of the show’s runtime being ads in and out of segments, I can’t even step outside without seeing the billboard or another 5 ads shoved in my mailbox!

I get 15 some-odd emails a day from different companies trying to get me to buy things. I block them and they pop up with a different email address. I can’t even open my email without ads popping up masquerading as actual messages (Gmail). Don’t get me started on the entire Google app thing.

I can’t open an online map without getting SPONSERED listings. And places I use the app to order from try to advertise me their own food WHILE I’M ORDERING. Panda Express started asking me if I want a subscription to Starz or whatever.

NO. NO. NO.

I’m exhausted. I want to go to a store without being immediately inundated with ads or sellers. “Buy this!” NO. LEAVE ME ALONE.

I’m overwhelmed. I’m overstimulated. I’m done. I don’t care how “quirky” or “flashy” or “hip” your ads are. I refuse to buy anything I see ads for now. It’s too much. Shut up.

TL;DR: we need controls and limits to who, what, where, and how things are advertised. It should be an enforcable crime to have ads louder than a certain decibel for one. But it’s not enforced and fines aren’t more than a drop in the bucket. I doubt I’ll see it in ny lifetime.

As I sat down this morning to enjoy my warm and full-flavored Folger’s coffee, it got me thinking: traditional advertising might disappear, but something sneakier would inevitably fill the void: product placement.

considering tons of free services are paid for with advertising, a lot of such services would cease to exist/be free.

be it websites such as youtube and streaming sites like twitch, or almost any website for that matter.

someone made a brand of water thats free and is entirely paid by advertising printed on the bottle, that would be gone too.

hell, i hate ads, but considering i use ublock, i havent seen any in years, and in real life you can just not look at them.

Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

There were ads in ancient Rome, just to show how deep the rot goes.

Interesting concept. Over the last few decades we have seen cigarettes/vapes alcohol, small plastics etc come under scrutiny as they harm people’s health. But there are physical objects that harm physical health.

Advertising is much more subjective I tend of what constitutes harm, and mental health is again still on the back foot compared to body health.

In some places we have seen bans on cigarette adverting and even bans on cigarettes. So at a small scale it can be implemented.

I loved ads as a kid. It shaped my career, but it’s an out of control monster that needs looking at. I am growing to hate it.

It’s also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.

Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.

It’s a “rich get richer” mechanic that any halfway competent dev would’ve patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.