Advertising isn't the general concept of letting people know what products are available for purchase. It's more specifically doing this for money and showing it to people who don't want to see it. One might quibble about exactly what the word "advertising" encompasses, but that description covers the bad stuff pretty well, whatever name you want to give it.

I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?

A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.

A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.

But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.

That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.

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drdeca 2 days ago | parent [-]

> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.

So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the end it doesn't really matter. That's under 0.1% of TV viewing and it's a unique situation. Yes edge cases exist, edge cases always exist, but that's a very tiny one.

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drdeca a day ago | parent [-]

If a definition can be changed in a way that makes it both simpler and removes an edge case, I think that is often (but not always) a sign that the change may be a good one.

(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)

I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.

Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.

	▲	wat10000 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitions aren't that important. What's important is figuring out what contributes to society and what ends up just looting our attention. A good (but not perfect) guideline is that voluntary transactions are beneficial to both parties because otherwise they wouldn't participate, and transactions where one party doesn't actively agree to it are often bad because the other party has no incentive to make it otherwise. That's why I focused on whether the viewer actually wants it. If I seek it out, then it's useful or at least entertaining. If I don't, then it's probably a net negative for me.

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wat10000 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a spectrum. Movie trailers are closer to the "not ads" portion of the spectrum, although when shown in theaters they are much more ad-like than when made available online.

There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.