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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Perhaps there is a difference in listing a service in some sort of index, like the phone book, versus techniques intended to develop a need (or want) where there wasn't one otherwise, like an iPod commercial.