this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Oh please yes
Put a 100% stop to advertising but also marketing altogether.
How do you propose new businesses will work? Genuinely looking for discussion.
There used to be a business catalog book called “yellow pages”. Now there are map applications, price comparison sites, customer review sites, and keyword search engines. All of those make advertisements unnecessary.
However that would work, i dont care. Open source software has next to no marketing and I've found it all through chat groups, etc.
I've found my local super market and bakery simply by walking by
I buy toothpaste by trying a few and sticking by one I like
I never watch commercials, I don't do advertising or marketing, and I'm missing out on nothing
The lines get really blurry.
Manufacturers pay grocery stores shelving fees, both to be stocked in that store at all and for specific locations (eye level shelving is prime real estate). That the toothpaste is on the shelf there at all for you to see it and decide to try it... is basically due to a paid advertisement.
Bakeries often put signs about openings or events at the end of the block. Do you think that should be banned, too? What about a billboard in their own parking lot?
You'rr under arrest for advertising open source software lol. It's illegal to discuss products as promotion is advertising.
I'm not the person you were replying to and I also don't have a good answer to the question, but man, the giddiness I feel at the idea of yeeting every single sales department on the planet directly into the stratosphere... Pure euphoria.
By growing.
How do they grow if they can't tell anyone about their products or services?
My local bakery doesn't have that issue
They just make great bread so people go there by the hundreds
Open source software doesn't have that problem, I found everything I love
Once I need a product I can go to a forum or chat group and find reviews
Your local bakery can rely on local customers who likely walk right by it. They produce inexpensive products that are relatively easy and quick to produce.
Not every business is like that. Maybe they spent a lot of money upfront on research and development and need to shift x units by a certain time to make it work financially? How could they do that if they have no physical presence on the high street and without telling people at scale that they exist?
Open source software is generally free, written by volunteers. There isn't the financial pressure to sell and recover costs by a certain time.
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.
By telling them, who said you cant? Communication and advertisement are two different things.
Its crazy that by no advertisement you immediately jumped to you cant tell anyone about anything
By telling who? And How?
Communication isnt advertisement. Depends on the type of business dude. Theres a thing called word of mouth.
And how do you do that en-masse? How do you spread the word to people by word of mouth who haven't heard of your product/service?
I’ve found many wonderful products through advertising that I never would have otherwise. So many small businesses would have to be able to show off their products to new customers somehow.
It’s easy enough* to restrict advertising, there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
*we’ve done it before, we can do it again, and if we aren’t smart enough to figure it out then we deserve this bullshit honestly.
If you don't mind answering, what kind of advertising have you found products you now enjoy through?
Not at all. I find a fair amount through Kickstarter campaigns, like the Yarro Studios Dice-o-matic, and the mandolin Youtube channel I follow will obviously self-promote their Patreon which has all kinds of great content. A lot of product reviews done by stores would be likely counted as advertisements, too. I’ve found good music through Instagram ads for it and I don’t even listen to Negative25 but their ad videos are really funny skits all on their own.
The thing is that we tend to like to know about things that we will enjoy and we don’t mind watching good ads. Bad ads, ads that are lying or dancing around the truth, and especially ads for things we don’t care about(which is everything if it interrupts a tense moment in a show) are all what we really don’t want to see.
Okay so Lemmy, Jerboa, Phone, ISP all were found via advertising. So if I am enjoying this conversation, every facit of it came to my notice via advertising. Word out mouth and online discussions are advertising
Word of mouth and discussions are not the kind of advertising being discussed in the article.
That would make more sense, maybe the title saying making all advertising illegal is inaccurate then.
Seems to me it's an efficiency problem.
If you want to send an email to someone, you don't send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn't useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it's typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.
People out there who want that product need to know what's on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn't be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it's so open to abuse, it's a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.
More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don't, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.