this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)
submitted 1 week 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] 14 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it's not something that can change based on individual effort.

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