MotteAnon12345
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User ID: 1551
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
This is a rather extreme and unlikely example because combining services like this dramatically degrades the quality of the service. If the only way for me to get coke is to wade through a pile of unrelated garbage because the company's interface makes it impossible for me to express my intent (because that would trigger the anti-marketing laws), I'm going somewhere else.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
If it wasn't for all the anti-spam measures, I'd host my own email servers in a heartbeat (I already host my own website, code repos, etc...). And I do think services like email should be part of a personal cloud offering. It wouldn't cost more than a dollar or two a month (per user) to run once it achieves scale. It would also have much better privacy behavior because the user would actually be the customer.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
I already pay for quite a few such services. It's nowhere near enough and still doesn't address the marketing arms race that adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
Doesn't deal with the second deeper problem I highlighted which is polluting the information commons.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
There's no point arguing about the social good of advertising in the abstract, without reference to the content that advertising supports and makes available. It's the kind of woolly-headed socialism that college students love to talk when tuition comes up.
No. Collective behavior is very much a thing. The information environment is a commons and ads shit on the commons. One person's behavior very much has a negative externality on the rest.
Without advertising, Youtube and Twitter are only available on a subscription basis, OTA TV and Radio are limited to government or charities, and newspapers would fail completely.
Would a subscription basis be so bad? Especially, with a massively expanded user base that would drastically reduce costs per-user? And we already have paid equivalents to newspapers (and you yourself pointed out that ads are no longer such a large part of the newspaper revenue stream). And news alternatives (like Substack) are (imo) much better and completely subscription based.
We have a huge surplus of information in this age. I'm not convinced at all that all of it is impossible without ads.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
Yep. Agreed. Thanks.
Side note: modern guerilla marketing (which is essentially word-of-mouth) is a different story, but I don't think that's actually what OP is complaining about, any more than OP would say reviews should be banned.
As long as the "guerilla" marketers aren't paid for spreading the information, that's perfectly fine. And I explicitly stated that unpaid reviews would be fine:
Is posting a positive review of some product now illegal? Not if you didn't get paid for it.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
This is a terrible, infantile idea.
Dude... Chill... This is just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it.
This is so blatantly untrue that it's hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America. Zero research was done going into this, just a whiny infant complaining about advertising that could be easily avoided.
First off, chill out. There's no need for personal attacks. And quantity very much matters here. Some random ad in a medium that nobody pays attention to is very different from our current environment where we are positively bathed in this stuff every moment of every day.
I agree that people not paying for ad-free products is a good argument. My first counter-argument is that e.g. paying for youtube premium would only get rid of a small fraction of ads that I experience every day. The marginal gain isn't worthwhile. People do regularly pay for ad blockers (or at least put in effort into getting them). And friction is a thing. There are lots of services that I could theoretically benefit from but don't pay for because it isn't worth the hassle of managing. Youtube is a tiny part of my day. The hassle of managing a youtube premium subscription isn't worthwhile (and they've done nothing to reduce the hassle because they don't have an incentive to).
My second is something I brought up in my original post:
A deeper reason is that once one company starts using ads, the rest have to follow or get drowned out. This turns into a soft marketing war and leads to misallocation of resources (into advertising dollars from other productive uses). This is why crowding out good information is an important part of the theory of harm.
I genuinely think this soft marketing war drastically inflates the "value" of ads. After all, does Amazon (or their marketing clients) really expect people to buy twenty dollars worth of stuff off the ads on a Kindle? I'm an order of magnitude away from that for my entire life for all ads I've ever seen anywhere! No, I suspect it is companies trying not to get drowned out.
There's also a large economy of scale problem here. Consumer Reports exists. They are small because they're expensive and they're expensive because they're small. Yes, removing ads would be a sea change in how our information systems have to operate and people are going to have to get used to paying explicitly for a lot more stuff. It's going to require new business models and interfaces. Substack is a great example. I woul;d have never paid for individual bloggers before them. It was just too much of a hassle even if I enjoyed the content. But Substack (and Patreon as well) have drastically reduced friction and as a result, I just checked and I'm paying for ~ten blogs (with subscriptions to a few more). And if after all that, customers still don't want to pay... I contend that's a good thing. It's the market aligning with people's actual expressed preferences.
Regarding neutral media: capitalism is customers paying for neutral media. And I don't know about you but most of my neutral media comes from Substack (which you also don't like for some reason...) where I do in fact pay directly to hear from sources that I care about. And Substack the company is technically not profitable yet but the popular writers on there are extremely profitable which makes me think that Substack the company could be easily profitable if they wanted to be. After all, how much does it really cost to host a bunch of simple mostly-text-and-images websites in 2026?
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
The cops don't go around drug testing your food every single time you go to a restaurant. But what if there was fentanyl in your cocktail?!
Enforcement is always a sliding scale and thankfully has good economies of scale. If someone is doing something blatantly illegal, only a few people need to spot one instance of it for the whole thing to come to light (and ex post punishments work quite well). And yes, minor violations will slip by. As long as the major violations get caught, we've still made a lot of progress.
One thing that helps us here is that people at large don't like ads. We're not trying to prevent a transaction that all parties consider beneficial and therefore all parties have an incentive to hide. At least one party here (the final customer marketed to) is getting harmed (and believes that they're getting harmed). And I suspect a lot of corporations don't like paying through the nose for marketing either but just can't do anything about it. I suspect they'd love a legally enforced marketing truce so they could get back to competing on the merits of their products. After all, why does the average nerd get into making something? Because they love the prospect of marketing it? Or actually making it?
How do porn ads work? Usually I just X out and with thousands of times masturbating I can’t think of how any ad resulted in money changing hands.
You don't. But I'm sure some consumer of porn would. Or just websites who don't want their competition to get an illicit leg up in the market? We only need one (or a few) of them to bring in the authorities.
But if we did manage to get rid of 95% of ads my gut says I would like the world better and things would be cheaper. I currently have zero stock positions in businesses making money off selling ads so now would be a great time for Trump to announce no more ads.
Thanks. Thought gotta admit I got a small laugh out of the idea of Trump (or really anybody in federal government) pulling off something this contentious and complicated.
And of course obviously stupid debate for first amendment reasons. I think a lot of current ad limitations are unconstitutional.
The supreme court has been willing to be fairly nuanced for example in the case of porn and political donations. Campaign finance laws are still a thing even though the supreme court has ruled that political donations are covered by the first amendment.
MotteAnon12345
24d ago
I already answered most of your objections in my original post. Specifically, I wrote:
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
- Party A will presumably be some corporation. What if they hire another firm to build a website for them? Is that now illegal? No: because the website design is only given to party A. Party B (here the design firm) is not communicating with party C.
- Is hosting a corporate website now illegal? No: because party C has specifically solicited the specific information by typing in the URL, following a link, etc...
- Is posting a positive review of some product now illegal? Not if you didn't get paid for it.
So, direct advertisements (e.g. "marketing" copy posted on the company's own website for its own products) isn't covered by my definition at all and would continue to be legal (intentionally so).
And your third objection:
- The weatherman isn't giving you the weather. He's giving it to the news station that is then broadcasting to you.
- The maker of the bumper sticker gave the sticker to the car owner. They don't care what the car owner does with it and neither does my proposed law.
- Branded clothing: this is an interesting point that I'll address below.
- Political signage: as long as you're paying for the sign and not the other way around, this is again perfectly fine. Even if the sign was given to you for free, I would be fine with it. Again, the artist isn't giving information to others. He gave the sign to you. You're free to e.g. stick it in a closet never to be seen again. It is you who chose to disseminate the information by sticking the sign in your front yard.
Please think about these examples in light of the theory of harm that I proposed:
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
None of them (except the branded clothing example possibly) run afoul of it.
Branded clothing is a genuine gray area. If there was similar but non-branded clothing available from the same company that sold for more, I'd definitely consider the branded clothing paid for by the discount. But there often won't be and at least for the initial implementation, I think such cases would slip by. But branded products are easily one of the least egregious forms of marketing around.
Nonstandard forms of payment: is already something the legal profession (and industry at large) has a lot of experience dealing with for e.g. insider trading, bribes, trusted actors getting free expensive meals from sales people, etc... Banks for example have very extensive policies around limits to entertaining clients to "avoid the appearance of impropriety."
And finally:
I'm not sure I accept your premise that advertising is a net negative. There are certainly many things I have gladly purchased that I found out about through advertising. My intuitive sense is that ads have had a net positive or at least net neutral impact on my life, not a negative one.
I'm trying to be charitable here but this is just so far from my experiences that I have a hard time believing it. How often in a typical month do you buy something off of an advertisement? Something that you weren't already thinking of getting (or at least a generally similar product)?
MotteAnon12345
25d ago
Re. China and the environment: https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/assisted-thinking.
TL;DR China's economy mostly runs on coal. The renewables they do have on their local grid only make small contributions. Also, if you read some of the comments, their existing solar industry is running into serious headwinds and the solar panels they do have only have a utilization factor of ~11-12%.
MotteAnon12345
25d ago
(Does this count as CW? Happy to post it somewhere else if that would be more appropriate.)
I really liked the idea of banning advertising from this blog post (though the post itself is somewhat poorly written and light on the details). HN has a lively discussion of it. I've seen some mentions of this idea here and there but never a really good analysis on it. And I want to change that!
The first step is of course to tighten up the definitions. The most important is to define advertising. I would define it as:
Advertising is whenever party A pays party B to give unsolicited information to party C.
(Maybe the resident lawyers here could have a crack at cleaning this up?)
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
- Party A will presumably be some corporation. What if they hire another firm to build a website for them? Is that now illegal? No: because the website design is only given to party A. Party B (here the design firm) is not communicating with party C.
- Is hosting a corporate website now illegal? No: because party C has specifically solicited the specific information by typing in the URL, following a link, etc...
- Is posting a positive review of some product now illegal? Not if you didn't get paid for it.
- Are Google ads ok because the user "solicited" the results when they ran the search? No. The solicitation must be "reasonably" specific. A keyword doesn't count (unless maybe if it is something explicit like the name of the company but any decent search engine would already surface those results without side-payments...).
- What about trailers before movies? This one is interesting. Theaters could advertise two show times. The time when the movie actually starts and a period before when trailers are showing. If you show up early, you've effectively solicited trailers. Does this break my own argument? I'm not sure... Either way, studios paying to show trailers would be in the gray zone at least.
So, what is illegal?
- Spam (unsolicited marketing emails but not emails that you signed up for). Unless the spammers are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts...
- Google, Youtube, Meta, parts of Amazon (the sponsored results at least), etc.... Pretty much any ad-supported business model is now illegal.
- Ads in newspapers. Product placement in movies, etc...
- Those annoying sales people who call you out of the blue.
- The entire fashion industry?
Why do I want this?
- The obvious reasons: ads are annoying and obnoxious and degrade the general experience of the web. And I genuinely do believe that lots of marketing just serves to mislead and manipulate.
- A deeper reason is that once one company starts using ads, the rest have to follow or get drowned out. This turns into a soft marketing war and leads to misallocation of resources (into advertising dollars from other productive uses). This is why crowding out good information is an important part of the theory of harm.
Possible objections?
- Marketing is just efficiently getting information to the user! This is obviously nonsense to me. We live in a completely information saturated environment. A world with Wikipedia and (non-sponsored) Amazon results cannot possibly be reliant on ads to get enough information to the user.
- First amendment concerns: I'm on the record as rather blasé about freedom of speech so I don't really care? But many people on this website do so I'll say: no party is being restricted from saying whatever they want, just restricted from using a sock-puppet to do it.
- Difficulty of definition/enforcement: I think I gave a decent definition above (but I'm not an expert so comments welcome!). Enforcement will I think be doable in the important cases at least because marketing by its very nature needs to be noticeable.
Any thoughts?
MotteAnon12345
25d ago
I was catching up on the quality contribution threads for last month (yes, I'm very late...) and I ran across this post from @Amadan.
I found this part specifically was interesting in the broader context of the discussion:
Assuming, of course, that their standards are not too high... You don't want fat Sally the checkout clerk or carousel-riding Cathy, fine. You insist on a 20-something slim attractive virgin who is agreeable and submissive? Hmm, good luck if you're not a 6/6/6. (Or a Mormon.)
One of these things is not like the other.
For men:
- Six figures: quite difficult to do. Statistically only a fourth of the men in the US achieve this (and of course this assumes that the requirement won't change if all men achieved this).
- Six feet: mostly driven by genetics and childhood nutrition. And only achieved by 14.5% of men in the US (according to Google).
- Six pack: this presumably any man could achieve with sufficient exercise (and diet control) though it might be difficult to do concurrently with a six figure job.
For women:
- 20-something: every woman will be a 20-something for ten years of her life.
- Slim/attractive (they're mostly the same thing): partially driven by genetics? But still, exercise and diet go a long way here.
- Virgin who is agreeable and submissive: these are all completely within the median woman's control. As they say, manners cost nothing.
Is it just me or is this scale a bit tilted?
(Apologies for responding so late and in a top-level comment; I didn't want this getting buried in a weeks old thread.)
MotteAnon12345
8mo ago
Somehow, I sort-of agree and mostly disagree with both of you.
First off, the vast majority of people believe what they're told to believe. The source can vary (based mostly on historically contingent details) but it's external nature does not.
So, when @FCfromSSC talks about tribes and irreconcilable differences, it feels rather silly to me. There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
And Secondly, the conflict isn't about some specific problem. It's not even about any specific values. It's about power! Ambitious unscrupulous person A needs a weapon against political opponent B. What is he to do?! In our current system, the answer is to accuse the person of some moral failing. If this exact same person was to be dropped into a corporation, they would play dumb office politics games (and maybe hopefully differentiate themselves through commercial achievements). If they were dropped into China? They'd sing the praises of the party and complain about how their opponents were letting the party down.
And ambitious people are simply a fact of life. With a few scruples and the right incentives, they can be quite beneficial! But not when their incentives are to shit on the moral commons in the pursuit of power.
The root problem here is democracy. It weakens central authority and makes power a free-for-all. The net results is that politics infects everything downstream (and everything is downstream of the sovereign).
@FCfromSSC, get rid of the blue tribe and you will find the red tribe splitting at the seams. And you won't like the results.
@WandererintheWilderness, get rid of this problem and another will be found in its place.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
And vaguely related to the above is this Wired story: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/.
The headline is "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover" and it starts by revealing their full names. And it only goes downhill from there.
To me, it's utterly obvious that this is a hit piece. But then I looked at the HN discussion of this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910.
HN is a pretty good proxy for a left-aligned highly-online space and it is remarkable how uniform opinion is there. There's a single top-level comment pointing out that revealing individual's names like this is out of the ordinary but the rest of the opinions seem to range from (paraphrasing) "these people are idiots for listening to Elon" to "these people are traitors" (and need to be hanged?).
How long do you think this tension is going to last? Is Elon going to just continue doing his thing (and actually get something done?) and will people calm down or will he get reined in somehow? Or are we in for another tedious four years of pointless shouting?
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Speak for yourself. I grew up in a 4.5k sqft house (family of four) and we absolutely used the space. In fact, later on, my parents added an extra 400sqft extension because they wanted more space for a second home office.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
The Terri Schiavo case isn't relevant because carrying a nonviable fetus is far more damaging to the mother than caring for a comatose patient is for a hospital.
Good point on perverse incentives from the primary system.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Typically, the solution to these problems is advanced pricing. The hospital examines you and gives you a fixed quote. If there are complications, the hospital is on the hook for them. I've gotten medical services that were effectively not covered by insurance and this worked really well. For a bigger example, take a look at https://surgerycenterok.com/. There's an old but great interview by the founder: https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-care/.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
The Gen IV designs that don't rely on water as the heat carrier/moderator (I think molten salt or liquid sodium based ones) operate at ~700C so are quite suitable for process heat. Of course, good luck getting the NRC to approve any of them.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Honestly, I haven't been keeping track. Judging from Trump's first presidency, he's big on talk and short on action so I just haven't bothered. Bureaucracies tend to be permanent barring jarring events so my prior is that nothing will be done.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
No. They'll get their information from their insurers and from the legal departments at the hospitals where they're employed, and I guarantee you that the attorneys involved aren't basing their advice on Pro Publica articles.
Fair enough.
The court addressed this specifically in IV.A. Specifically, on page 22, they state:
The Center argues that such a standard means that doctors are susceptible to a battle of the experts when not every doctor might reach the same medical judgment in each case. We rejected such an interpretation in In re State. “Reasonable medical judgment,” we held, “does not mean that every doctor would reach the same conclusion.” Rather, in an enforcement action under the Human Life Protection Act, the burden is the State’s to prove that no reasonable physician would have concluded that the mother had a life-threatening physical condition that placed her at risk of death or of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion was performed.
(Footnotes elided.)
The opinion has more exposition on this (and I assume the case they refer to has even more). It does not seem to be as unreasonable a standard as you seem to imply.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Really? I could believe e.g. that some fundamentalist voters (a small minority) believe that the non-viable fetus is still a living creature and therefore deserves protection. I could also believe that Ken Paxton is an attack dog who will go after suffering mothers because it's in his political interest. But the median voter? If you brought a case of a late term miscarriage, would the median voter really insist doctors wait for weeks before offering medical care?
Admittedly, I don't have great evidence for my view. I haven't looked at voter surveys on this question for example (are there any?). I do have some evidence: the Tx legislature clarified the law in HB 3058. But what evidence do you have?
And if the median voter doesn't have such a hardline view, we're back to my original question. Why would the Texas Legislature impose such a blunt guideline instead of a more nuanced one?
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Page three of the opinion:
A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.
Similar wording shows up repeatedly.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine.
That was my assumption as well back in 2022. But then the Russia sanctions did nothing, Ukraine made some good advances and then got bogged down, and the West started running out of ammo. That last part is what got me. Because that's how the West won WWII against Germany (& Japan) and then the Cold War against Russia. We outproduced them until they couldn't afford it anymore.
Right now, the situation is reversed. It's Russia that enjoys a comfortable margin in artillery, tanks, and men. The West is giving Ukraine everything that isn't nailed down and it still isn't enough. Maybe the problem is a bloated inefficient military sector? Maybe the problem is political will? Maybe the problem is that we don't care enough about Ukraine? But those are all structural factors that are unlikely to change anytime soon. My current thinking is that the West can't challenge Russia in most of Europe and Russia can't challenge us in America proper. Africa is up for grabs and China will get the rest.
The Ukraine war has proven NATO to be a paper tiger.
MotteAnon12345
1yr ago
Many (most?) major "infrastructural" financial institutions are based in NYC. These are often companies nobody has heard of but nevertheless end up handling most of dollars flowing through the world. Good examples would be DTC, BNY, and JPMC. These banks don't make that much money (except of course for JPMC) but they fulfill critical low level roles like clearing, asset custody (e.g. DTC nominally owns most financial assets in the US economy!), etc... If a court wants to impose their will on any actor in the USD centric financial system, they use these institutions to do it and NYC is the place to do it at.
Argentinian bonds are a good case study here: a NYC judge was able to keep Argentina from paying off any of its bond holders (and thereby choking its access to debt markets). Obviously, the judge had no jurisdiction over Argentina itself. But he did over the intermediaries needed to facilitate any dollar payments!
No, you're making a static world assumption. In a world without marketing, consumer directed information venues would pop up. You would have e.g. magazines (/blogs/whatever) that users paid for that would ferret out interesting new products that their viewers might be interested in. And they would have drastically better incentives.
For example, take Ozempic. I found out about it thanks to ACX. Was he paid by Ozempic companies to put up that post? I don't think so. In a world without ads, there would be medical journals that specifically focused on upcoming treatments with honest evaluations because that's what their revenue source would demand! In fact, even with ads, we already have medical journals that they already have to put in a bunch of effort to make sure they aren't biased by their funding sources.
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