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(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:
(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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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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