I work at a big company that advertises often at big events. We have internal discussions about making the ads less obnoxious.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Im a big legalization of victimless crimes type of person but conversley I would like all advertisement for them banned outside of the other "adult" establishments. I would like them to require search engines and such to not index them and for non "adult" chatbots to know about or have any reference to them. It should be like a sorta grey web where to find the things you gotta sorta be in the things to begin with.
I mean, I assume what you mean is bans on, like, ads on youtube.
Unfortunately, suppose you actually passed this legislation and the courts upheld it (idk if it would work, ianal). Well then one of two things would happen:
- The companies would ignore the law, and you would either need to give up or engage in never-ending legal battles.
- The companies would simply stop providing their services to your area. At which point constituents would complain and get you to roll back the law, or would start using vpns to circumvent it.
As if civilization didn't exist without advertising for thousands of years just fine.
???
I mean, if you gather up several thousand people who hate ads more than they like youtube, I'm sure this would work fine. But most people prefer youtube with ads to no youtube, and they almost certainly don't hate ads enough to uproot their whole lives and move to a different geographic location. I'm not saying that ads are an immutible part of nature - I'm saying they arent a big enough deal to be worth it to most people. Any given individual is far better off by simply using ad blockers
Stop using 'free services' They're neither free nor even cheap
The unfortunate reality is they cannot be avoided in some cases. There is not a paid alternative to Facebook, nor are there to a lot of f2p mobile games.
My grandma had a tablet about a decade ago, and I loaded it up with tons of paid $1-$3 casino games for her (it's what she wanted) but a decade later, when going to reinstall them to a new tablet, all of them no longer exist on the play store and seemingly 100% of current games are either ad supported or require iap to refil your virtual currency.
She literally did what you asked and today she still has no options. What should my 86 year old grandma do in this case?
You don't want to ban advertising, you want people to have an interest in only making their services known honestly and with the intention of letting people know "this exists" instead of with the intention of getting people to buy something. Because it's actually good to let people know where they can get services or goods and what kinds of services and goods are available. And the only way to truly get to this point is by abolishing capitalism. As long as capitalism exists, there will always be incentive for people to make advertising more than just letting people know. As long as capitalism exists, you can do stuff like "going after false advertising more rigorously", "banning certain types of ads" or "restricting how many ads are allowed and where they are allowed". But that only limits the harm advertising can do, it can never stop it completely.
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How would this work? Got a sign outside your store: that's an ad. Want to put thing up for sale, how do you let people know about it?
I guess what you need is a town that bans selling services and things, because that's the only way to not have ads.
Or have a place in town that has a directory where that space is the only space for ads.
Just ban paying for advertising would probably do enough