[plinio_silva]

This will probably offend some startup people here (who probably rely on advertisement to run their otherwise unprofitable websites), but advertisement is evil. How can you believe in the power of capitalism and the invisible hand and still think it's ok that people are all the time being led into buying stuff they do not need because marketers study specifically how to psychologically manipulate people into associating good emotions with material crap?

I'm not saying there aren't other factors involved, but do you really think the most popular brands are so due to merit? Don't you think the world would be different if not so many people would just stop consuming products from the very corporations they are protesting against?

This could be a very long rant, I just hope you can see where I'm going with this, that the really unethical thing to do is to allow advertisement to continue to exist.

[SomeCallMeTim]

It doesn't offend me, but the concept that all advertising is evil is very, very misguided. Just because big brands often use evil techniques to advertise doesn't mean that it's all bad.

If I'm selling something used on Craigslist, that's advertising. If I'm looking for a product to fill a need, and I don't know what to buy, the paid links on Google have more than once led me to the perfect product. Every single thing on Amazon's site (fill in ANY e-commerce site online here -- even most of Craigslist, with things like apartments for rent), right down to the product page, is, fundamentally, advertising.

You'd pretty much have to restrict the web to a highly edited version of Wikipedia if you were going to outlaw advertising. And if you succeeded in banning all advertising you'd just prevent new entries into any market, or the creations of new markets, because everyone would tend to buy the products at the stores they knew about already.

What's evil is not educating people in logical thinking, and in not inoculating them at a young age against the kinds of psychological tricks you're talking about.

[plinio_silva]

I'm sorry, english is not my first language, so I maybe that's why I thought the word advertising didn't include craigslist postings. In portuguese we have a very specific word to the advertising I'm referring to, "propaganda" (which also has the same meaning as in english).

Craigslist/Ebay are exactly the kind of things we need more, especially ebay, where you can see different offerings side by side and compare them on objective grounds, then decide which one better fits your needs. And that's the key, if I'm on ebay it's because I'm looking for something, people are not trying to convince me to buy groupons when I'm actually looking to read a fine article from HN.

If "I" succeeded in banning the advertisement I'm talking about (basically impossible without censorship, and that's the last thing I'd want), more sites would spring up to help people who are looking for something. You wouldn't always buy from the same brand/store because you would have these tools to help you make sure (with the least amount of effort possible) you are making the best buy you can.

Furthermore, I think it's the existence of advertisement that is reducing the incentives to create alternate business models (for content websites, for example), like micro-payments (think very small subscription fee for a site like salon.com), and basically tips, which could be considered donations but would be too small to be worth it with the current payment processors.

[SomeCallMeTim]

I read an article recently that pointed out that an episode of a TV show is effectively an advertisement for the next TV show in the series. Propaganda certainly has the connotations that you're looking for, but in English it's typically used to refer to a certain class of political ads. I get what you're saying, though, and I think the proper response is education.

Craigslist is great, and I might consider a subscription to Salon.com if it were inexpensive enough, but I think you're overestimating humanity's willingness to part with cash. All you have to do is look at just about ANY paid app on an iPhone or (especially) Android, and you'll find people complaining that it should be free.

Just a few years ago, buying a small game for your computer would cost from $7-$20. Now people complain if a game costs $1, even if the game contains dozens of hours of entertainment value. It's not like it costs less to make a polished game now than it did a few years ago.

And if a game is fun enough and has enough replay value, I can actually make more than the $0.70 I make from a $1 sale by showing the users ads (considering I get 200x as many downloads of a free version). Other models do exist -- in-app payments for buying "coins" to play a game more, for example -- but some of those end up feeling more evil than the advertising you're decrying.

What you'd need to fight is the sense of entitlement that people have around web content, which is what game developers have to fight on Android. I mean, just look at the comments on this very article! We're talking HN readers who feel entitled to get everything for free. People who have no connection with web site creation or running a business will typically have even less of a personal connection to the companies that they're hurting when disabling ads.

Micropayments for news sites could happen if you got the right sites to buy in, but it's been tried again and again, so I suspect that it's the lack of customers rather than the lack of site support that's the problem. If you got the New York Times, Salon.com, and a half dozen other high-profile sites to join a micropayment network, so I could sign up ONCE and go to a lot of different news sites ad free, I'd like that as a customer. But I suspect that you'd see the same ratio of 200x as many people sticking with the "free" ad-supported sites.

But then again, it would be a hard sell for the New York Times, at least: They want $35/month for a full digital subscription. That's off by at least a factor of ten from what I'd be willing to pay, possibly more. I think I'd be willing to pay $8/month to a micropayment network that included unlimited access to at least a dozen or so sites ad-free, but the NYT is demanding a much higher payment for unlimited access, so it's hard to believe they'd take a much lower amount.

Finally, I wouldn't want the micropayments service to charge me every time I looked at a site. I don't want to think about using the web; I want to browse freely, without worrying that I'm spending money every time I click a link. So those micropayments would need to come out of a monthly flat rate, to be divvied up among the various sites I'd actually visited.