I disagree with this cynical take. A Dell computer ad may exist to drive sales but that isnt exclusive to informing people of features and benefits of the machine. The purpose of a good ad should be to inform the viewer/listener of how what and why the product offers. Many do exactly that.
If noone advertised their computers, people would still look into the various brands of computers as long as there is a natural demand for them. If you need a computer, you can go to a website or a physical store and have the ability to relatively fairly compare the different brands. Advertising doesn't really help with this.
The main problem I see with advertising is that it seems to largely exist to manufacture a demand for products, not to inform people about the differentiation between competing products. Everyone's working just as hard as they were 100 years ago, even though productivity has supposedly massively increased. Our increase in productivity seems to go towards getting people to buy into things that they probably don't need, like a new iPhone every year.
Why not halve the number of phones/laptops/ads we're exposed to in exchange for halving our working hours?
You're making a lot of implicit assumptions here. If nobody advertises computers, why would people want to buy one? Why should businesses have computers in stock? Why different brands? How would people even know about computer stores?
Somehow there seems to be an assumption that people just know.
People would buy them because they're useful. We can use advertising to create a demand for plenty of things that are not useful.
Overall, I do think that computers are useful, but if people are having to create an artificial demand for them, perhaps we're putting excessive amounts of labour into creating more computers instead of, for example, making them better. The vast majority of consumers aren't going to have a very good idea of what makes a computer better, so that's not usually the focus of computer advertisements.
> We can use advertising to create a demand for plenty of things that are not useful.
Who decides whats useful for not? Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them. They would need some way to tell that at scale, and ads are a way to do it.
> Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them.
I find that hard to believe. Companies do what is likely to make them profit, which sometimes involves doing things they surely know is bad for people. Cigarettes are still advertised in many countries; do you really think that the cigarette advertisers seriously think their product is useful?
If anything, I think you're more likely to get advertisements for the products that are relatively bad for people, since when your motive is to do good for people, you're less likely to oversell your product. It might be fine and well for this dynamic to resolve itself in a critical forum like HN, but when ads for random products are just thrown out to regular consumers, the rational thinking about how useful a product actually is will be minor.
How do people know computers are useful? How do people know you can buy one and what it costs? How do people know where to go when they want a computer?
Without advertising there is only word of mouth, which is slow and probably doesn't reach many people at all.
So if computers are useful, shouldn't it be allowed to advertise them?
