this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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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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[–] ZMoney@lemmy.world 18 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Sao Paolo did this in 2006.

Under the cult of the "Invisible Hand of the Free Market", the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.

[–] fermuch@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

How did it go? Why did they stop it?

[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 2 points 52 minutes ago (1 children)

As far as I can tell, they didn't stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo's ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 1 points 17 minutes ago

I'm grateful to you for digging those up.