There are also ads for services. I used to be a photographer, and without my little Facebook/Instagram ads people would have had to largely rely on word of mouth, meaning the more established photographers would absolutely dominate my little rural market even when their photography was worse.

Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.

> I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled.

If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.

How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?

I don’t think all ads are the same, and I feel like you are choosing to pretend the ads you don’t mind aren’t ads at all.

You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.

And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.

Isn’t the catalog an ad?

The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.

A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?

Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?

That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.

For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?

There are no successful economies without ads.

Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

Yes, the store has a catalog. They want you to see the catalog, so they pay someone to tell you that the catalog exists.

So instead of buying ad space we can now buy catalog space and reinvent the wheel.

Brands pay stores for shelf space. How would you stop that in practice?

So stores are just one form of ads then, let’s ban stores too while we’re at it.

Not everyone lives close to stores.

Catalogs are ads.

But you are buying into viewing ads when you use services that show you ads.

Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.

Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.

Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.

But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?

Magazines and phone books are often largely ad-supported. They largely wouldn't exist without some amount of advertising.

Depends on the niche, really. I despise ads, but I can also admit to having learned about products from them that I have subsequently purchased and been pleased with.

Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.

If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.

How does the first person find the product to recommend it, though? There has to be SOMEONE who tries the product without being recommended by a previous customer.

No, there are very few markets in which all of the buyers have perfect information.

It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.

The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...

But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.

Having a problem and having a solution to that problem are two different things.

I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.

This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.

You might not know it is a problem and that it is solvable.

I sincerely do not believe this. I suspect that you have a very specific definition of ad that is far narrower than I do, but I do not believe you never once saw a movie trailer and decided to go see the film, or saw a billboard or sign for a restaurant while out on vacation and decided to check it out. Or that you never went to the grocery store to pick up the steak that was on sale this week. Or that every single tech purchase you have ever made in your life was exclusively and solely on the word of mouth recommendation of your close friends, all of whom had previously purchased identical products with their own money.

Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.

Not even movie advertisements like trailers? Or job ads? Housing ads?

I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.

Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.

I remember having that experience as a kid - seeing an ad for Action Man™ during my Saturday morning cartoon block, and feeling that I need that toy right now. My dad then explained to me that these advertisements are carefully crafted to elicit this response from kids, and that I should always think critically about the messaging in ads.

> until the 19th century, ads were basically just information dense textual statements.

I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card

Damn! I have been reading about Amusing Ourselves to Death on here since weeks and I assumed it was a new book from a contemporary author! I'll get it now, thanks for being the one who finally got me to :)

I just wanted to second recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. A very good and short read that I find continually relevant applying the same ideas to social media.

They get paid per ad. Whether the product actually works is not their problem, unless they get a lawsuit. IIRC Facebook did lose a lawsuit over scam ads, but continued doing the process it was sued for, because it's so profitable, and just added a check so those ads don't get shown to regulators.

>Why YT and Google in general would want

They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads.

Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.

People are really out here acting like we didn't have a functioning economy before we invited ad companies in to parasitize global commerce. I don't give a fuck if it means "less discoverability", if I could snap my fingers and make every ad company disappear tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

>You are ignoring the value of discovering a good or service.

This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.

Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).

Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.

>Is there not always some sort "marketplace"

How exactly does that work for virtual products?

> I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.

How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.

Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

Do you know the very concept of prices and price tags is one of the first advertisements?

Let me clarify. When I said I'm going to buy it anyway I didn't necessarily mean at that time. There are many things that are in the "do not need to go out and buy it now but I do need to buy it in the near future" category.

I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.

> When we used to pay for newspapers

Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.

Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.

That’s exactly my point. Free speech but only when the receiver has agreed to participate in that medium.

You guys did not read past the first sentence?

I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.

For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.

I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).

Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.

I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...

One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.

Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind

To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.

So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?

Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?

Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?

To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well

Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there

I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.

Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.

There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.

If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.

> By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.

Who pays for the website? In the end, a world without ads gets very pricey very quickly.

Yes. And AML/KYC. Advertisements don't bear the burden of AML/KYC, but micropayments do.

AML/KYC costs money, enough to make truly micro micropayments impossible.

Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space.

Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.

Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?

That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or product that includes advertising as part of buying the third party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the service or product then you're down to off-brand products that don't run ads

I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd rather that people living under the poverty threshold get subsidised directly

Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet

I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run

We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.

ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.

Sponsorblock exists as well.

> A new policy that prevents creators from doing sponsor spots? We all know what the result of that would be.

Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.

They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.

No, I think they shouldn't be double dipping. If I pay for premium I want no ads whatsoever. Not for the content creators to sneak some in anyway.

And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.

What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.

A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522719

However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.

You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE

And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.

Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.

Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.

I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.

Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]

Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

The "creators" are complicit, and are in fact directly responsible for the worst aspects of the platform. Especially with most popular and well-known ones, the content itself is typically a very long, insidious ad, which makes the platform-supplied ad breaks a breath of fresh air in comparison.

They kinda created this fake locked down market that people expect to be able to be used, same as Apple, compared to say, just downloading apps normally like on a computer.

Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol

I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.

If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.

"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"

This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.

If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.

If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.

Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.