this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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It's also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.
Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.
It's a "rich get richer" mechanic that any halfway competent dev would've patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.
It's also such a funny contradiction: a big part of the free market model rests on the idea that well informed consumers can vote with their wallet, which should reward good businesses and punish bad ones. Yet it is very difficult to argue consumers have ever been informed enough to make this work, which is in large part due to advertising flooding communication channels with noise, and also because it is unreasonable to expect a consumer to be fully informed for the hundreds of purchases they make on a daily basis.
You cannot get away from advertising, ever, in any society, in any financial system, at any point of time in history after tribal societie.
It's a concept that you can't just "ban", nearly all the problems we have with it today is because it's uncontrolled and abused. The concept itself though is as unbannable as the concept of "selling" something.
The concept:
Is literally as old as humans moving away from tribal societies.
You can make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows about it, it's still useless.
It's already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/
No they didn't that's not banning advertising but that's regulating a specific type of advertising.
There's a pretty big difference.
And if you have the name of your business and what you sell on your store front? That's advertising. Or a card with your name on it to hand out to customers or coupons. That's advertising. Or logos on clothing or a sign that sits near the road that says SALE. That is advertising.
OP was downvoted for saying the truth, regulation is important, but businesses will fail if they have no way to catch your interest.
In fact it gets worse because small businesses will never be seen because nobody will have heard of them and everyone goes to the big store everyone already knows about.
There is balance to be had....
Lemmy is essentially just like Reddit at this point. It's just a bunch of the lowest common denominator circle jerking a lack of critical thinking.
You cannot have intelligent discussion, and group think is all that matters. Folks will not read your comment, they will find the single phrase they disagree with and hold onto it for dear life, missing the entire point.
And then ignore the whole premise and idea behind the discussion and reply in a way that makes absolutely no sense if they had average reading comprehension....
I miss the old Internet, where you could actually have discussions and pass ideas back and forth.
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