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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:
(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):
So, what is illegal?
Why do I want this?
Possible objections?
Any thoughts?
This is a terrible, infantile idea.
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.
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.
I think the stronger argument against ads is more that the median ad that makes someone purchase something is causing them to make a purchase that they probably shouldn't in a more ideal world, and people both do that and accept their time being wasted with extremely repetitive advertising because they're bad at making tradeoffs. So that people 'accept the cost' isn't a strong counterargument. And idk if the internet or sports would be doomed or particularly harmed without this much advertising, the economy is an equilibrium, people really like sports and the internet and would find other ways to pay for it. I'm not sure your last paragraph is an argument for advertising specifically more than it is an argument for a class of intellectuals with independent funding and has strong influence over the information diet of the average American. But as I said in my other comment I don't think the problem here is really the ads, it's the things being advertised.
Once you start with this logic, you end up somewhere between the khmer rouge and the Uncle Ted. Which, fine, make a much bigger argument for that if you want to, but it's way outside the bounds of OP or the essay he's citing back to. I don't think a mass consumer production economy is possible without branding and advertising. But then when you say:
There's a big difference between "Advertising should be more strictly regulated and limited" and "Advertising should be illegal." I don't even think you can really get from one to the other in terms of consequences.
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Dude... Chill... This is just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it.
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:
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?
Dude...Chill...This just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it. We argue, we hang out. Stick around, somebody will accuse you of much worse.
But I don't think we disagree that much really. When you say:
Then I can't philosophically argue with it. If you think the internet as it exists today is bad and should be burned to the ground and salted, great, I can jive with that. The vast majority of content would not exist or be accessible without ad supported models, if that is your goal than this is a good policy to reach it. If you are willing to bite the bullet and say Twitter Delenda Est, and youtube and facebook and instagram and every other social media service with it, then we can get to a logical position. But that is what you are arguing for here, and it's much bigger than advertising, there's not going to be social media or open content platforms that are subscription based. I'm actually curious to see someone try to make one, but I'm not sure I would subscribe if they did anyway. Even this place I wouldn't want to subscribe, a one time payment maybe, but the hassle isn't worth it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Youtube exists you can choose: a) not to consume youtube, b) to pay for youtube, c) pay for premium. The same choices exist for every content outlet. If ads offended you and you wanted to minimize consumption of ads, it would make sense to avoid advertising based content and stick to a few outlets that you can make ad free. Premium would give you an ad-free outlet, and if ads were as distasteful to the average consumer as believed, then one would consume only ad-free outlets. There's clearly a free market for ad-based and ad-free content operating right now, and most people consistently choose ad-based content over ad-free content.
This gets into a much bigger discussion, but I strongly suspect this isn't true, even if you think it is. You've almost definitely had >$20 of marginal spend for all the ads you've ever seen in your life, across every category of good. TLP's favorite scene from The Devil Wears Prada fits in here. Another example: when I was a kid the Greyhound Rescue had a booth at the fair every year. Fifteen years later, at 26, my wife wanted a dog, and I thought a greyhound would be a good pick, based on that awareness that formed long ago. I just wasn't in the market until then, but if they hadn't done that "advertising" I would never have gotten one.
Consider also with the Kindle example: I owned and used my first kindle for over a decade. Ten years of advertising is worth something.
But I'm not sure what the difference is to you between "Buying $20 worth of stuff" vs "not getting drowned out" anyway.
Clearly it costs more than Substack is making! I exclude Substack not because I dislike it, but because it is not profitable. Virtually every place we complain about ads today, didn't have ads at one point, and then they were introduced later to try to make the company profitable. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter. All used to be ad free. The Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy is the generational trauma of our time. Elon briefly mooted making Twitter subscription only and eliminating advertisements, but quickly abandoned that plan because it had no hope of success.
My other problem with substack as a neutral source of information is that subscriber based content inevitably tends towards siloed bubbles and extremes as writers cater to their subscribers. You're never going to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, and she is never going to subscribe to Kulak. Advertising on its own does not fix this, but it offers at least one path to success that doesn't rely on catering to the whims of your hardcore supporters. I'm glad Substack exists, there's value in allowing marginal and extreme voices to exist, but I don't find it a good source for neutral fact based reporting. Substack isn't going to tell me what went on at my local township meetings, or even in Harrisburg or Philadelphia. It's good for news in the sense of current events-commentary-opinion, it's not yet good for the kind of fundamentally uninteresting hard news that one historically got from a newspaper. And newspapers themselves have gotten worse at that job because of their reliance on subscriptions, leading to spiraling left-wing bias, leading to a shrinking and more left wing subscriber base, leading to spiraling left wing bias.
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You're right, banning advertising would destroy the web as we know it. Was there also a downside?
... you might want to reread that sentence and see if you can spot any logical inconsistencies.
The media motivated by capitalism unsurprisingly has a very strong pro-captial bias. Which has been intensifying in the past few years with billionaires buying up the remaining reputable media outlets like The Washington Post and CBS (those being more recent examples, this is not a new trend).
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What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Hobby.
That's a bit dismissive. Yes, Kiwi Farms technically is a rather low-tier website, but it's my understanding that its admin has had to put in far more effort than usual for a "hobby" website—e. g., placing his own hardware in data centers, and implementing his own software to battle people who DDOS and spam illegal content on his website to try to get it taken offline.
If it's not a business that makes money, it's a hobby, according to the IRS. I guess maybe you could classify it conceptually (though not legally) as a charity?
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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.
And it does cost $395/year, for the cheapest tier, 'X Premium+', that actually removes all instead of some twitter ads, which is a nontrivial fraction (something like 1/100th) of the median personal income in the US.
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When I block an annoying ad on twitter for Israeli hostage funding or something, it tells me that I can remove all ads by subscribing to premium. People don't get that?
...And then I don't pay them the next month.
What socialist powderpuff world do we live in where the profit a corporation makes has to be proportional to their costs rather than proportional to the value the customer puts on the service?
What catch-22? This is good price discrimination, every customer gets what they want at a price they can afford.
"That's not the industry breaking down, just its entire revenue model. Surely the industry won't be impacted by the loss of the majority of its revenue!
In the 1950s the New York Times made 70-80% of its revenue from advertising, today it is just 20%. You think that has nothing to do with the decline of newspaper journalism?
It doesn't apply in every single case.
The profit doesn't "have to" be proportional to the company's costs, but in a working market where companies compete against each other, a company's profit will be proportional to its costs because if it tries to make too much profit, it will be undercut by a competing company that makes less profit but wins over all the customers. If this doesn't happen, that's a market failure. And of course a market failure is exactly what this is.
Price discrimination in general is a bad deal for the consumer, because in the limit you end up with everyone paying so much that they only benefit by a tiny fractional amount from the product compared to not buying it.
This is like saying that every death is caused by heart failure. In a sense it's true, but it's described in a way which obfuscates what's going on. Yes, if the Times can't sell papers, it can't sell ads in papers. If the Times was hit by a meteor it would be able to sell even fewer papers, and thus gain even less from advertising, but describing that as "that's its revenue model breaking down" would be misleading, if technically true.
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So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.
I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:
(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).
In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.
I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).
Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.
You're still getting ads for Internet Explorer 10?
Nah, this was back when it came out - I hated that ad so much that it sticks out in my mind.
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How would you like for Youtube to pay for the infrastructure around getting those videos to you? Who do you think should be paying to host, manage, and operate the service?
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
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I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
Yes yes, it's very fun being a free rider. Convenient that there are still enough rubes that we can get away with it for a while.
But you object to advertising and you object to paying for youtube, but you like watching youtube. How do you think youtube should be funded?
I would rather that youtube die, but as long as it is alive, its network effects make competition hard, so I have no choice but to watch it if I want to watch amateur videos. I wouldn't call this "like watching Youtube". I like watching some things that are on Youtube, but the fact that they are on Youtube makes them worse and if Youtube didn't exist they would be better.
This is like the argument that Microsoft has brought computers to people by creating Windows. No, they don't get credit for doing X if they do X worse than other people would but I have to go through them because they have a stranglehold on the market.
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My answer is, I don't have to care. I'll ride for free until the wheels fall off, and then I'll pirate everything until copyright enforcement assassins break in through the ceiling and kill me. I will live in a cave and eat bugs and make the rest of humanity join me before I ever watch god damn commercials again.
Y'all gotta stop trying to replace a good system with a fair one.
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I am not convinced that people using adblock or not buying advertising products are free riders. I suspect its anyone who's revenue is derived from ads.
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I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
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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.
I would bet like all of my net worth against this. Being told a product exists makes you realize you might buy it. Being told something exists 500 times makes the average person more likely to realize you might buy it. Big companies have tried reducing ad spend and measuring if it reduces profits, and it has, and then they restarted ad spend.
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Yep. Agreed. Thanks.
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:
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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.
The proposition being argued here is "People should not be allowed to consume content unless they have paid for it."
Well, ok, that's too harsh. Probably more like:
"People should not be allowed to choose to consume unwanted content in exchange for consuming content that they want."
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.
Once you are talking about narrower restrictions on particular kinds of advertising, there's probably logic there. But capital-A Advertising can't be isolated from the empire built upon it.
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.
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.
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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.
Which were tiny hobby websites, largely free riding on government and university research investments.
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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.
No, normies would have the people trying put to death first.
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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.
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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.
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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.
How else does one model evidence based on consumer choice than by pointing to two options, understanding the tradeoffs between them, and charting what choices people make to see how highly people value those tradeoffs?
If consumers had no choice and could only consume content with ads, that would only tell us that they like the content more than they dislike the ads. NFL OTA broadcasts would fall in this category, viewers are making a decision based on ads. Add choices and we can narrow it down. We can say that Youtube users dislike ads at a value less than $14/month or whatever it is for premium. And we can say that the degree to which most people like having content from ad-supported platforms more than they like getting content from their local library > their degree of dislike of ads.
But that's not what you're doing. First you're claiming that if people don't avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. Now you're claiming that if people do avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. It is impossible for X and not-X to be evidence for the same thing.
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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.
Replace "ads" here with "pollute the commons" and notice that the argument doesn't really change. Yes, if you pollute the commons, some people will make expenditures to avoid being harmed by the polluted commons and some will not. That doesn't justify polluting the commons.
Content produced and hosted on private platforms isn't the commons.
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
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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:
It does also seem like several of the most obvious threads were not addressed. MotteAnon12345:
Um, if internet ads bother you → ad-block?
Doesn't deal with the second deeper problem I highlighted which is polluting the information commons.
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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 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.
I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.
To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.
You also assert that this hinges on:
It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.
I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:
No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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