Advertising should be viewed through the same lens as code injection is in computer security (when an attacker gets a computer system to run a program that it actually shouldn’t and that usually benefits the attacker).
The point of an advertisement is literally to inject the idea of a need into your mind, a need that you didn’t already have before (“You do actually need a new car.”), or a more specific version of an existing need (“You’re need food? You should really eat this!”).
It’s an attack on the integrity of your very being and it should be defended against.
Example: It recently crossed my mind that maybe I could rent cargo bikes when needed and turns out I could! This service would've been very useful to me, but I simply didn't know about it before. An ad in this case would've been beneficial for everyone.
My point is that ads don't necessarily "inject" a need but an option. Problem is that while the latter increases buyer freedom, the former increases seller revenue so guess which type of ads we see more frequently...
@buherator @esther This is a really common argument I hear, but it falls flat when actually scrutinized: because advertising, in the sense that it is meant here, is fundamentally based on *asymmetry*.
The whole point of advertising, and advertising spend, is to elevate your presence above that of the competition. Which is to say, every dollar you spend on advertising is a dollar you spend on *reducing* the discoverability of your competition, ie. of other options.
Since there are more competitors (who lose discoverability) than there are "you"s (who gains discoverability), this means that every dollar towards advertising is a net-loss for total discoverability; most things become *less* visible, only one thing more so.
If we designed our society around discovery of options, it wouldn't look like advertising. It would look more like an ad-free phone book, or perhaps a consumer-reports-style comparison table or facet-based search engine. Crucially, there would fundamentally be no relation between ad spend and discoverability.
TL;DR: Advertising does not actually serve improved discovery of options and in fact does the opposite, that's just the moral fig leaf the industry uses to justify its "social license to operate".
@buherator @esther This doesn't really engage with my point at all, though - this is basically arguing "but if you kind of squint, with the right conditions, then the current model *can* work like an index of stuff".
And sure, that's true, but the part that matters here is how the system behaves when those conditions are *not* met, and we're *not* living in the optimal case. And in that case, it behaves exactly like I described, and that is considered desirable in the industry because it's what keeps the money coming in.
Second, my point with this whole discussion is exactly to avoid potentially harmful generalizations, so naturally I will point to examples where having ads makes sense and where proposed generalizations (ads inject need, zero-sum discoverability) fail.
Do I think the current ads ecosystem is anywhere near good? Absolutely not. But without identifying the *actual* problems we won't get workable solutions.
@buherator @esther This is not a "harmful generalization". This is literally *how the advertising industry works*. It *is* the "actual problem". Why do you think that practically every single advertising platform has some kind of bidding mechanism nowadays?
It doesn't matter whether you can think of scenarios where it "isn't that bad", regardless of how "realistic" they are. You measure the impact of a system on society by measuring its *worst-case* scenarios, not its *best-case* scenarios. And that is what I am trying to illustrate here.
The model we have for advertising is optimized *for* that worst-case scenario, in that it always converges to it at scale. This is a choice as a society. We can choose not to accept that, and instead pick models that behave respectfully towards society *even under worst-case conditions*.
But to do that, we first need to acknowledge that this model is bad, and that it's not actually optimized for discovery; it's optimized for the *suppression of* discovery, and the "discovery" component is just used as a moral fig leaf.
Once this is understood and acknowledged, we can select models that *actually are* optimized for discovery, without this worst-case failure mode.
@buherator @esther Thanks.
As for a concrete example of other models (but definitely not the only possibility): to take your example of festival posters, there's a long-standing practice in many places in Europe to have the city's tourism board manage event posters across the town/city, which lists all of the events for eg. the coming week with some description.
This practice has somewhat died out in some places, it seems, but it would be an example of "how to make sure people are aware of the events, without the asymmetry".
In other words I don't think your money-for-presence model is a zero-sum game.