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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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[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

You have a long blog post because Google's SEO favors that, and that's tied into advertising.

So in your hypothetical advertising free world we also don't have search engines, at all? Or at least search engine results specifically don't favor long blog posts?

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

SEO as we know it is a hugely marketing driven thing. The recipe blog does it because they want to bring eyeballs from Google search results, which gives them advertising revenue. Google optimizes their rules for SEO to likewise bring in Google AdSense money.

Search engines would exist, but the incentives are all different.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Right, but the food blog is still going to end up with an incentive for people to see it, so they're still going to SEO because they can't get subs/patrons/whatever they get income from from people who don't know they exist. So, the implication is that search engines would preference a different style of food blog in the absence of advertising?

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, if you want my radical answer, it's that people would write food blogs because they like giving out recipes in a mutual aid society. They don't care about SEO, because it's just a bother. Traffic will come to them organically or it won't.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 hour ago

The hypothetical was a world without advertising, not a world without capitalism. You could make a food blog for the love of it without caring if anyone reads it or not now, but you likely wouldn't bother with SEO if you did for the same reason.