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| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Your definition of ad is too narrow then, because those are all different types of ads. A store advertising its goods or even having billboard ads saying the store is at such and such street is, well, an ad. | | |
| ▲ | layer8 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Directories aren’t ads. The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford. Like in a phonebook. Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The crucial feature would be that nobody would have to pay to get listed, or only a small nominal fee that anyone can afford You see the contradiction. You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.) | | |
| ▲ | gpm 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws: 1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime. 2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside? > I'd call this making attention-theft a crime Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal? > A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost? | | |
| ▲ | gpm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside? You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount. > Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal? Only if they were paid to do so. > This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost? Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture. I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost". |
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| ▲ | YetAnotherNick 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fixed fee highly favors big players. Not even sure why you want fixed fee. Either remove fee at all or charge higher for bigger players or charge based on sale rather than listing. | | |
| ▲ | gpm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | By the same I mean equal non-discriminatory pricing - not necessarily "fixed" rather than "by sale" or "by view" or what have you but that if it's "by view" then it's "x cents per view" with the same x everyone and if it's "3% of referred sale revenue" it's that for everyone. The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder. |
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| ▲ | FridgeSeal 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think they’ve made the difference pretty clear? Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle. | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing. If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50 people and then the money runs out. That's completely different from getting onto a phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can see my company's offer. | |
| ▲ | layer8 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see no contradiction. Google or Meta ads are not a catalog. They are imposed on people who didn’t decide to browse a catalog, and also you can’t browse all Google/Meta ads as a catalog. A catalog listing products or businesses doesn’t constitute ads, just as a phonebook doesn’t. | |
| ▲ | pharrington 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What does "defunding the difference" mean? layer8 and phantasmish absolutely said what the difference was. |
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| ▲ | daedrdev 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | companies have to pay to get their products on shelve in many grocery stores |
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| ▲ | tracker1 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even in the phone books of old, you had ads as part of the directories... Businesses paid for those listings... Even today's equivalent, yelp, etc. are trying to sell add-on services to the businesses and can harm your businss if you don't pay up for the features. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, and in this new ad-free world, those things works not be allowed, and all businesses would be on a level playing field, with none privileged over the others simply because they have a larger advertising budget. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I own ten thousand businesses, all of whom employ me as a contractor. All businesses being on a level playing field puts me at quite an advantage! If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions. | |
| ▲ | tracker1 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's no such thing as a level playing field... you think EVERY brand can fit on store shelves for discovery? | | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This is entirely a human construct, we can absolutely make it a level playing field if we collectively choose so. What a sad comment. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You can make it more level, but in any system constrained by the physical world, you can never make it completely level. Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling. There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf. Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products. But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage. Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory. But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved? | |
| ▲ | mvdtnz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Until you try to grapple with real world problems like limited shelf space, limited directory space, how the ads (ahem sorry, directory entries) should be sorted, how to deal with setting boundaries around local directories, etc. | | |
| ▲ | shimman a day ago | parent [-] | | Good thing there is no fundamental law of the universe forcing merchants to stock every single good ever invented. | | |
| ▲ | tracker1 a day ago | parent [-] | | Without advertising (or marketing of some kind), how do you propose for any new product to EVER reach a store shelf. | | |
| ▲ | shimman a day ago | parent [-] | | You convince the store owner in person, this was kinda the case throughout all of humanity until very recently. It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers. They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology? Once again, what is the benefit for society here? |
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| ▲ | mvdtnz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And who puts together this magic directory, without pay? | |
| ▲ | AuryGlenz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Who is maintaining and paying for this directory? | | |
| ▲ | layer8 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Those who are interested in knowing what services exist. | | |
| ▲ | phantasmish 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites! | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth. Yahoo was a directory before it was a "search engine". AOL was a curated walled garden. Web rings were a thing, great for playful discovery, terrible for finding a specific thing. Heck for that matter, web ring banners are arguably just interactive "banners ads". Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters. | | |
| ▲ | strbean 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth. Weren't those better before ads got involved? > Web rings were a thing Aren't those literally word of mouth? > Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Weren't those better before ads got involved? The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name. > Aren't those literally word of mouth? Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022175643/http://www10.yaho... |
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| ▲ | tpmoney 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They won't. Notice that Angies list doesn't operate on the "customer pays for the list" model. That's because any directory service that depends on the searcher paying suffers from the problem that once you've found what you're looking for, you have no reason to keep paying for the directory. If I need a lawn guy, I only need to find one, and then I have their number. Why am I going to keep paying the "Lawn Guy Directory" $5 a month after I found someone? And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back. Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer. |
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| ▲ | stickfigure 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | phantasmish 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh, I know how it works. You could have read my whole comment and saved yourself typing anything about the yellow pages. You sweet summer child. |
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