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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This is a terrible, infantile idea.

The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

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.

Why do I want this? ... The obvious reasons: ads are annoying and obnoxious and degrade the general experience of the web.

There's not going to BE any general experience of the web you stupid slut.

The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen. Note that I don't include a model that is built primarily around free-riding on government/university research dollars, like the early internet. Nor a model that is built around the millennial lifestyle subsidy like current Substack or ChatGPT, where the free infrastructure is funded by VC money with the expectation of later exploitation. All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.

Moreover, on the web or not, you are asking for every ad you are ever shown, other than billboards I guess. Libraries exist! Physical media can be borrowed from them, and you would have more media than you would ever be able to consume in fifteen lifetimes, and never see a single ad beyond a flier for the knitting circle. Yet nobody who complains about advertising does that. If ads on youtube offended people, they could pay for youtube premium, but they mostly don't. If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not? The ad-supported Kindle is $20 cheaper than the ad free one, the ad-supported model outsells the ad-free version. And, of course, physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that. Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content. There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.

The only real exception that occurs to me is sports, which are impossible to watch without seeing ads. American sports like the NFL and MLB are shown with ads in the broadcast, while racecars and MMA fighters and soccer teams give no option to skip ads as they are on the competitors themselves! But, of course, without those ads we wouldn't have those competitions at those levels. Without advertising, I wouldn't be able to get the game on the radio or OTA TV, I'd have to go PPV, which I would not do. Without sponsor dollars, MMA fighters wouldn't be able to train to the level that they have pushed the sport. The ecosystem would be impossible. The same, of course, applies to things like local radio news: no traffic on the twos without Chevy dealers BLOWING OUT THEIR INVENTORY. Well, I guess we'd still have NPR, that bastion of politically neutral fact-finding...

Which is the real point, advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism. When we mourn the decline of the politically-neutral American local newspaper, we are too stupid to realize what we are mourning is mostly the decline of newspaper advertising. Time was, you needed the newspaper to find out basic facts about the world. Movie times, church schedules, the weather. Every responsible American needed access to a newspaper, which drove mass subscriptions, which made advertising in the newspaper profitable, which funded investigative journalism and reporting. And because the goal was to sell ads, newspapers wanted the broadest reach possible, Republicans buy sneakers too. Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry. Local papers lack any but the most rudimentary reporting, while national papers like the New York Times cater to subscriber biases and lose even the pretense of neutrality. Substack, again, suffers from this: while an occasional gem might appear in the muck, almost every substack author becomes captured by his audience, forced to cater to their whims. So many interesting bloggers or writers become increasingly less interesting as they cater to their audiences' whims. In a world without advertising, we are at the mercy of subscribers and their biases.

All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.

What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.

Hobby.

If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not?

  1. They are not technical people and don't understand this well.
  2. They don't trust the company to be honest with them when they claim "this will get rid of the ads". The company can take it back at any time.
  3. The company probably won't price the ad-free version in a way proportional to the difference in value. If they make 10 cents from you on ads, the price of the ad-free version may still be 20 dollars more, because they also like to do market segmentation and overcharge less price sensitive people.
  4. Sometimes people do buy the ad free version. Buying a non-Kindle is a better deal than buying an ad-free Kindle. Of course this is a catch-22--if the customers don't buy the ad-free version you will claim the customers don't mind ads, but if they do buy it you will say that the market is obviously working and therefore there is no need to get rid of ads. (Which violates conservation of expected evidence.)

Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry.

That's the newspaper industry breaking down, not the advertising model specifically. And a lot of woke depends on civil rights laws, government agencies, and similar non-market forces.

I'm pretty sure Disney still does a lot of advertising. It hasn't kept them nonpolitical.

There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.

This is an individualistic argument, but isn't the more compelling case for removing ads one from social good? Ads are a net negative to the consumer AND to the companies who have to pay for them. As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero. Yet companies are compelled to have an ad spend in order to keep up with the competition. 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. On the flip side, the most heavily advertised products are generally the worst, or at least a subpar option, which is why the need so much advertising to begin with. As a result, naive consumers are bamboozled into buying worse products for higher prices (they have to cover the overhead of the ads after all).

In my view this resolves into a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would benefit if ads (or at least certain modalities) were banned, but each individual player is incentivized from taking that step. Hence we need the Leviathan to step in.

An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen.

Go back to the early days of the web before eternal september and you'll pretty much see this. Advertising networks in their current scummy form only appeared when the internet went mainstream.

I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.

physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that.

I do that. That's exactly what I do, along with the ad-free streaming service from the library. I would recommend this to everyone. I actually dislike ads enough that I avoid all the stuff you're talking about in here. I stopped watching sports because the ads were too obnoxious. I think there are in fact many people living this lifestyle, but you would only know about this by meeting them or asking about it.

FWIW, I also drop like a hot potato anything that includes advertisements. I don't think this is representative of any larger number of people doing the same.

Which lifestyle was achieved with zero government involvement, outside of the taxes paid to the public library!

I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants an ad-free internet also supports taxes funding public libraries (up to lizard-man's constant).

Honestly, I've never seen a library funding proposal I didn't think should be higher. It's literally price discrimination executed to perfection.

This reasoning violates conservation of expected evidence. You can't have "people avoid ads" and "people don't avoid ads" be evidence for the same thing.

The argument is that different people have different preferences with respect to ads. Some people don't really mind them and will accept them in exchange for cost savings. Other people hate ads and have the option to make choices to avoid them. Thus the current system allows everyone to satisfy their preferences reasonably well. A system that banned ads would only allow one of these groups to satisfy their preferences.

Zero research was done going into this

I do wonder what a more convincing version of this for the modern internet would look like. Like, the idea there is some reflexivity that negates some of the utilitarian arguments for capitalism is not new. There is extensive literature:

In the revised sequence, this flow is reversed and businesses exercise control over consumers by advertising and related salesmanship activities.

It does also seem like several of the most obvious threads were not addressed. MotteAnon12345:

The obvious reasons: ads are annoying and obnoxious and degrade the general experience of the web.

Um, if internet ads bother you → ad-block?

Ad block is an easy price-discrimination tool, but it's not as comprehensive as the ban desires it to be, and ad block presents significant free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems on a societal basis, an argument I didn't want to get into again here.

But yeah, ad block solves at least half of the problem for anyone who cares enough to do it.

Rereading what I wrote, I was pretty unclear.

More explicitly: yes, I agree. The economic and ethical considerations of ad-block are non-trivial and annoying to constantly rehash. From a practical perspective, if you are so inclined to absolutely hate advertising, using an ad blocker, or just paying a trivial amount of money (for an upper-middle-class consumer) for premium service, seems eminently more feasible than trying to figure out how to ban advertising outright.

I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.

OP's war on ad-supporter platforms presumably also hits GMail and all the free email hosting alternatives. Honestly, it does worry me that those have piecemeal become load-bearing parts of the economy: I need it to reset the account password for my bank.

On the other hand, I'm not anxious to retvrn to the days of email addresses tying you to your ISP: "DSL now more expensive than the alternatives, but it's the email address I use for everything like my bank accounts." I'm not sure who else I'd want to host email (honestly: USPS? Not the greatest alternative), and I can't see masses of normies paying for Proton Mail or such.

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.

Hell, go back even further. Roman gladiators were paid to do product endorsements. Ridley Scott hired a team of historians to jazz up the movie Gladiator, and they were planning to depict this, but figured that audiences would have a hard time taking it seriously even though it's true.

I thought about that, but I too felt like it was a bit of a reach!

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