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

submitted 1 week 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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[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 15 points 5 days ago

#YES, PLEASE.

I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:

I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.

It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.