[tomnipotent]

And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

[tforcram]

Tenable for what, global business? Many local businesses do fine without advertising and/or using these methods.

Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.

[coldtea]

I'm all for that as well.

We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.

[Matticus_Rex]

Banning advertising would have the opposite effect; entrenched players would have a massive moat. The biggest gains from advertising by far accrue to newer entrants, not the big companies.

[tomnipotent]

Everything single one of those local businesses is also doing advertising, and is probably how you found them in the first place. They're buying local newspaper adverts, using flyers, or participating in valpaks/coupon mailers.

[tforcram]

Actually all of those sound fine to me... I guess it's really just Internet advertising that feels wrong to me, especially when they try to fill in as the source of revenue themselves rather than a means to drive revenue for the main product.

[tomnipotent]

It's understandable, but it's a position that doesn't consider the large swathe of lower-income households that have access to goods and services subsidized through ads (much of my family). I know it's not a position most of HN seems to be sympathetic with, but for many ad-supported services, including Netflix and Spotify, would be inaccessible without ads. My family can't afford to go out to movies regularly, or spend money out at restaurants, or go on vacation (ever), but they still deserve some leisure time and entertainment and a non-trivial percentage of the market is funded through ads.

The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.

Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.

[coldtea]

>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?

The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.

>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.

[tomnipotent]

That's a lovely fantasy, but there's a graveyard of failed businesses that didn't make it because customers couldn't find them.