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

submitted 1 day ago by sundrei@lemmy.sdf.org to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world

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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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[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Advertising is when they’re getting paid for it. Otherwise it’s called recommending.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world -4 points 1 day ago

Congratulations! You've just reinvented MLMs!

[–] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works -5 points 1 day ago

And paying people to suggest they buy something off the guy who has more stuff than they can sell by word of mouth has been our way of efficiently distributing goods for thousands of years. It's almost as if it is solving an actual dilemma.