[HN Gopher] I changed my mind about advertising
___________________________________________________________________
I changed my mind about advertising
Author : tosh
Score : 197 points
Date : 2022-02-09 08:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thesample.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (thesample.ai)
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain.
| rizkeyz wrote:
| Just for a moment imagine a world without any ads. I for one do
| not have to imagine that, but just have to remember back, when I
| grew up in the eastern block.
|
| What you wanted to buy was available in the stores and you could
| always ask someone, if you needed something very special.
|
| If an ad were merely a statement of existence - but that not what
| ads have become: "brand refresh", "pivot", "awareness",
| "emotion", or any other subtle or not so subtle message that
| wants to influence you. I see so many people driven to "buy"
| things they do not need and then "buy" again books on how to
| clean the mess up. From where I'm standing, this is all just very
| ridiculous at this point.
|
| Note that I am not saying there is a free will, not at all, but
| hey, do I want to this endless mostly senseless stream of
| unneeded stuff let influence me or something a little more
| grounded?
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I used to hate X until X made me money
|
| The human tragedy in a nutshell
| paiute wrote:
| Remember when early Google ads were useful? And not annoying. If
| you can hook me up with a product or service I might want that's
| great. In contrast I switched from liberty mutual insurance
| because their ads annoy me.
| Konnstann wrote:
| The article even states at the end that it doesn't touch on the
| fact that advertising has shifted how content is displayed and
| even created, which I find hilarious. Adblockers have mitigated a
| lot of the "attention cost" associated with ads but not the fact
| that clickbait, "list" articles that require a page reload for
| every item, etc are now the norm.
| soheil wrote:
| Just because you find a crazy edge case that ads work for doesn't
| make advertising as a whole any less evil.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Well of course once something starts making you money you will
| stop looking down on it. This dude clearly demonstrated post-hoc
| rationalization in action.
|
| This is what stood out to me though:
|
| > _In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low
| friction._
|
| It's anything BUT low friction. The attention-based economy is a
| race to the bottom where every vendor SCREAMS THEIR LUNGS OUT
| just for a few minutes of your time and even if you indulge only
| 20 of them you'll still emerge not very informed on the other
| side, with your time wasted, and with your brain's ability to
| focus gradually eroded.
|
| That last part is -- and should be officially labeled as -- a
| criminal act.
|
| I don't mind if this or that website has some unobtrusive ads
| (Troy Hunt's website is a very good example; StackExchange is
| also fine). The problem is that EVERYONE wants a piece of the
| sweet ad money so the users get bombarded with them from all
| directions.
|
| No, it's not low friction _at all_. Not for the users /
| consumers anyway. To them it's a minefield.
|
| ---
|
| I even _want_ ads in some areas. But the line between being
| informative / optional and obnoxious / prevalent-and-mandatory
| has been crossed at least 15 years ago, both in TV and the
| Internet. Tone them down and even us the techies might start
| enabling them -- because every now and then they are in fact
| useful.
|
| The reason I am disabling ads and I'm fighting them is because I
| know that by default they'll not give me anything I want, will
| take precious screen estate (25% of the screen ON A PHONE,
| REALLY?!), will get in the way and will do their absolute best to
| make me mis-click / mis-tap so they can get their $0.0001 because
| I "interacted with the ad". You ever tried to open an erotic
| video posted on Reddit without your content blockers? Good luck
| with that. Hint: moving elements on the screen. As if we're
| playing Asteroids and Brick Breaker at the same time.
|
| Of course I'll block ads. Advertisers must become good citizens
| of the net and we can then re-negotiate. Until then they will be
| treated like scum -- because they act like such, all the time.
|
| ---
|
| Sadly none of that even touches on the outright _malware_ that
| comes attached with a lot of modern advertising, to the point
| that Samsung actually issued a warning to not utter certain words
| IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME because their TV is listening.
|
| <facepalms>
|
| Just let that sink in for a minute.
|
| ...So OK, the guy made some money and now his perception is
| warped. Nothing particularly illuminating about his article
| however.
| tomp wrote:
| Well what can I say... thank god for AdBlock! Keep your ads ;)
| freediver wrote:
| Nothing wrong with ads if the user opts-in. Most ads online are
| opt-out (where "opt" usually means installing an ad-blocker).
| This is terrifyingly invasive.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I also changed my mind about advertising, a few years ago. I used
| to not want to use an ad blocker, due to my love of defaults (one
| extra thing to install, messes with the page possibly breaking it
| etc.) but also so that I could effortlessly support the content I
| was consuming. But the online advertising industry has gone too
| far and for me at least, I don't think there is coming back. Too
| much manipulation, too much tracking, too many obnoxious ads,
| auto-playing videos, outright scams and so on. I will block any
| ad I can. If too many people do it and the outlet I am reading /
| watching videos of can't no longer afford to produce content,
| they can open up donations. If they still can't support the
| effort on donos, then I think it's time to close shop. I feel
| like the reality is, someone else will step in. There are a lot
| of passionate people willing to put content up online just for
| the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized.
| I am happy for every one of those people who can make it their
| business and scale their operation up, truly. But I do not feel
| obliged to keep supporting them being able to produce online
| works as a business by giving away my privacy and sanity through
| being subjected by awful ads run by ad networks who think my
| online data is theirs and that it hasn't made its way to their
| database yet is a bug they need to fix.
| salford wrote:
| > There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content
| up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting
| their work recognized
|
| I had the same thought. Ads enable people who previously put up
| their content out of passion to do the same thing to commercial
| gain. Is this good or bad? On the plus side, it incentivizes
| the creation of more quality content. On the other hand, "labor
| of love" content is homier, less corporatized, and the extent
| to which they will help you on a given problem is not biased by
| their ability to earn money from said problem.
|
| It's a similar situation between mom and pop restaurants and
| chains. Now it's hard to say that one or the other is
| definitively better -- depends on what you're looking for. I
| wish there were resources out there to help understand the
| nature of this tradeoff and how it has played out in different
| areas of the economy.
| ianferrel wrote:
| We should commend the author for the transparency with which he
| describes the philosophical progression from "against
| advertising" to "in favor of advertising, now that I'm making
| money from it".
| m-i-l wrote:
| The whole article could have been replaced with the line "I
| changed my mind about advertising because I now make money from
| advertising". The fact that the author feels compelled to spin it
| out to a 480 word article suggests some deep-rooted unease with
| this, and also illustrates one of the (many) issues with an
| advertising-based revenue model - you have to learn to waste
| users time (aka "maximise for engagement") to maximise revenue.
|
| Digging a little deeper, the fact that 10% of forwarded emails
| are sponsored[0] highlights another major issue with advertising
| - the conflict of interest between user needs and site operator's
| profit. How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful
| unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which are
| potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the site
| operator's desire for profit)? And what is to stop the signal to
| noise ratio becoming completely untenable over time in the desire
| to maximise profit?
|
| I'm not completely anti-advertising BTW - there is a time and
| place for it. Just not when you are trying to use informational
| sites on the web. The analogy I've used is that you don't want
| annoying salespeople in a library getting between you and your
| books, but you don't mind them so much when you are down the high
| street shopping.
|
| [0] https://silken-cafe-474.notion.site/About-The-
| Sample-a989b5b...
| jacobobryant wrote:
| > The whole article could have been replaced with the line "I
| changed my mind about advertising because I now make money from
| advertising".
|
| I responded to this sentiment in another comment, but I'll just
| quote from the HN guidelines here: "Please respond to the
| strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a
| weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."[1]
|
| > How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful
| unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which are
| potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the site
| operator's desire for profit)?
|
| Because ads are clearly marked with a "sponsored" label.
|
| > And what is to stop the signal to noise ratio becoming
| completely untenable over time in the desire to maximise
| profit?
|
| Because if we send people newsletters they don't like, they'll
| be more likely to stop using the service.
|
| > the conflict of interest between user needs and site
| operator's profit.
|
| Interesting anecdote: I haven't measured this in a while, but
| at least when we first introduced ads, the sponsored
| newsletters tended to be rated more highly than the "organic"
| newsletters.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| NoGravitas wrote:
| >> How do I know which emails I can trust as having useful
| unbiased information (i.e. satisfying my needs), and which
| are potentially misleading junk adverts (i.e. satisfying the
| site operator's desire for profit)?
|
| > Because ads are clearly marked with a "sponsored" label.
|
| You've already demonstrated that you're willing to go back on
| previously held principles and commitments for profit. Why
| stop with just putting in ads? Why not stop marking ads with
| a sponsored label? Why not include a cryptominer payload? And
| why should anyone believe you when you say you won't?
| kazinator wrote:
| Why did I change my mind about advertising?
|
| "[M]y slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month
| in revenue."
|
| In other words, we can take Upton Sinclair's familiar witticism:
|
| _It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it._
|
| ... and add a corollary:
|
| _Even if he had once understood it prior to that salary._
| vmception wrote:
| "I use to be against sharecropping until I started making money
| from it"
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I personally would like to think I wouldn't compromise my
| principles for $10.8k/yr, but would prefer not to have to find
| out.
| gotostatement wrote:
| Hilarious article. "Why I changed my mind about advertising: I
| decided I wanted to make money off ads"
| quacked wrote:
| "Why This Nerd Changed His Mind About Nonviolent Resistance
| After Learning How to Fight"
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Someone changes their opinion in order to match their source of
| income. Film at 11.
| laurex wrote:
| We as humans are quite excellent in judging our own behavior as
| correct. We are not so good at imagining the downstream effects
| of our actions. The author is no doubt correct that there are not
| catastrophic effects from his choice of business model, but then
| to conclude that it means that advertising is really fine as long
| as some constraints are net seems to ignore that combined with
| corporate directives to (by law) maximize profit, large-scale ad-
| based businesses will find more and more justification for
| releasing those constraints. I'm a fan of brownies but it doesn't
| mean I'm going to argue that sugar is not harmful and the sugar
| industry not a driver of poor health outcomes.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > Along the way I've also adopted a new mental model for
| advertising
|
| AKA a coping mechanism
| npteljes wrote:
| Coping recently have taken on a negative meaning that was
| previously served by "apologist" among others. In this case, OP
| just became an apologist for the advertisement industry,
| because he found that it can make him money that he couldn't
| previously achieve.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Maybe their model just treats attention as a neutral thing to
| be taken by whatever takes the most of it?
| jonas_kgomo wrote:
| The early internet was preposed to have so called micro-paywalls
| by Ted Nelson, somehow the pioneers didn't really push for this
| paradigm. It would have created a generally sanity preserving
| web.
| zackmorris wrote:
| What would everyone think about trying to increase ad payouts?
|
| My feeling is that Google took 50% of the ad revenue 20 years ago
| and Facebook took perhaps 40% after that, so the remaining ad
| networks are trying to operate on 1/10 the revenue they enjoyed
| in the 1990s and that's why ad income is no longer viable for
| most of us. My numbers are probably way off but my sentiment
| isn't.
|
| It seems like we could fix that through various privacy/legal
| channels (breaking up big ad agencies?) and organizing against
| monopolies and duopolies.
|
| I don't expect that to be successful, but it could open a broader
| conversation about where the web went wrong doubling down on in
| its ever-escalating wealth inequality instead of engineering
| stuff like UBI that would have brought shared prosperity for
| everyone.
| scandox wrote:
| "Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the
| whole world. . . but for 900 MRR!"
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I see, you changed your mind because you're now profiting by
| stealing our attention and hacking our minds. Good thing ad
| blockers exist and keep getting better and better, hopefully one
| day they will completely nullify your profits and you'll be able
| to change your mind again.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I can't wait for the author's follow up, "I've changed my mind
| about hijacking visitors systems to mine cryptocurrency" once
| the ads don't pay well enough anymore.
| jbuhbjlnjbn wrote:
| It's really as simple as that. The author tries hard to frame
| it as a learning experience of some sort, but what stuck for me
| was he could not argumentatively distance himself from the most
| obvious ulterior motives, making money, the gain from it. This
| self-reflection is too shallow and comes across as an excuse
| imo. But still I appreciate a lot that he actually talks about
| it to create a discussion.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| > but what stuck for me was he could not argumentatively
| distance himself from the most obvious ulterior motives,
| making money, the gain from it.
|
| Sure, that could be influencing my reasoning, but it goes the
| other way too. It's easy to criticize ads as a business model
| when you don't have skin in the game ( _ducks_ ). That's why
| I decided not to bring up either of those points: I'd rather
| write for people who are willing to focus on the argument
| instead of assuming bad faith.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I theory, I don't mind ads. For years I avoided ad-blockers.
| Then...
|
| Ads make pages load slower. Ads on mobile browsers make the text
| jump around while I'm trying to read it. Ads put giant pop-ups
| over the text that I'm trying to read. Ads start playing loud
| music, or flash.
|
| The problem isn't ads, it's a lack of bounds about what ads can
| and can not do.
|
| The web ran fine for years with ad-blockers as a niche; but ad-
| blockers only got popular when the ads themselves overstepped
| their bounds and became too intrusive.
|
| I'd be much happier if ads were reasonable and I didn't feel like
| I needed an ad-blocker just to view the %$#%@ website.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep. I can remember the exact moment I decided to install an
| adblocker. I was on a comic site, and my entire browser got
| minimized, to show me a popup. That was it for me.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I'd be mostly fine with ads if they were:
|
| * first-party hosted: no needing to fetch content from 10
| different servers
|
| * verified by the site publisher: all ads are relevant and are
| not obviously malicious
|
| * predictably sized: this goes with the other two, ads must
| conform to a size that fits in the content and does not push
| content around
|
| * oh and of course they must never, ever autoplay video or
| audio
|
| I don't particularly care if this is all too hard to do. If
| it's just too much, make your product a paid service. Or just
| don't make it at all, that's fine too.
|
| edited: formatting
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes! Ordinary people _like_ ads. They put magazine ads up as
| posters in dorm rooms. They quote TV commercial catchphrases
| and jingles to one another. They watch the Super Bowl for the
| ads. People talk about podcast host read ads and do parody
| versions. And people love "influencers," who are just
| advertisers who say sassy things on Instagram or whatever.
|
| But no one likes web banner advertising. It's just a bad
| experience! At best people like it when you search and the
| thing they wanted is at the top of the list because of paid
| placement. They don't care if the placement was paid or not,
| but they like seeing the thing they wanted. Banner ads make
| the experience of using a web page worse, but unlike TV ads
| or magazine ads, they don't contribute anything good back.
| It's just "here is an ugly square that disrupts your browsing
| experience." Publishers should think about other ways of
| engaging reader attention.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Ads also eat up a vast proportion of your monthly data
| allowance if you're on mobile.
| harry-wood wrote:
| The worst offenders seem to be news sites run by traditional
| newspapers. Friends share links to these quite a lot, and very
| often I follow the link to an article that sounds quite
| interesting, and then... As you say, text jumping around, giant
| pop-ups, videos playing. I put up with it to a point, but if
| it's taking me three/four seconds and I'm still trying to close
| things down to read the article, then I'm thinking "That's a
| shame. I was interested to read the article... but not _that_
| interested". I don't really understand why this happens. Isn't
| it just obviously bad web design at that point?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Agreed. Show me static images, loaded server-side. Everything
| else can fuck off and die.
|
| I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me that
| allowing arbitrary code execution on my machine is an
| acceptable trade-off.
| xtracto wrote:
| My problem with ads is how obtrusive they are nowadays: Ads
| in the middle of an article, banner ads while playing a
| video, etc. Those are the ones I hate.
|
| Back in the day my wife was subscribed to Total Film (a UK
| film magazine), which had several full pages of ads related
| to sex phone numbers and other similar "services". These were
| pages at the end of the magazine that where full of ads. We
| really liked that format, because you could read the content
| without interruption and sure, if you wanted you could check
| the ads.
|
| It's the same reason why I hate TV ads that happen at
| different times within a program, but I don't mind ads in the
| SuperBowl that happen during the half time. Also why I don't
| really care about Youtube Ads that happen before a video will
| start (but if it interrupts the video in the middle, it
| sucks).
|
| I would be ok with pages that show you an ad when you load
| it, and then it completely goes away and leaves 100%
| functionality in the page to do whatever you are supposed to
| do there.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Exactly. I am perfectly happy to view ads in a context like
| readthedocs.io- a simple image (with link, of course) placed
| prominently yet still out of the way. Unfortunately too many
| sites have decided to make their content impossible to view
| without an adblocker so I just use uBlock Origin on everything.
|
| It's never going to get better. Sites are going to continue to
| squeeze every cent of revenue they can per user which will just
| drive more users to adblockers, making them need to make the
| ads _even worse_ to maintain income.
|
| Advertisers, you did this to yourselves.
| pier25 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I disable my ad blocker on certain sites like Reddit,
| Twitter,or forums I visit daily. I want to support those sites
| and I'm fine with ads as long as it's done respectfully.
| croes wrote:
| >When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product,"
| you are the customer.
|
| It's not the ads that make you the product but the tracking for
| the ads.
| dr_awkward wrote:
| One of my main issues with the idea of advertising as the
| attention economy that pays for the internet is that with the VC
| structures that fund startups, most services don't demand
| profitability until they're well into (or past) the scale-up
| phase. So, the typical growth curve for a "free" online product
| seems to be:
|
| -free to use at the beginning, no ads, "we are a startup! we do
| this cool thing that you will love" -as a critical mass of users
| is built and the demands for profit begin, it turns into "we are
| a scale-up. we're sorry to do this, but we need to monetize in
| some token and nonintrusive way" -eventually, the
| tool/service/offering becomes a critical gatekeeper (login with
| FB/Google/Apple; you need an email address to apply for any
| professional job today; event organizing gets walled behind FB
| accounts; can't read twitter/reddit/fb--places where legtimate--
| though possibly ill-informed or intentionally manipulated--
| discourse actually takes place), "hey, the shareholders demand
| growth and dividends. enjoy the ads we sold your eyeballs for."
|
| Who ever asked for their smart TV to show ads as part of the
| software? No one? Why does the stock weather app on my Samsung
| phone have ads--it didn't always. I didn't sign up for this.
|
| I signed up for a non-intrusive experience. The service got made
| into something that should you choose not to participate, you
| will suffer economically. And the advertising got inserted--
| accept the EULA and the ads, or suffer the consequences.
|
| BTW: ads don't work nearly as well as the ad publishers want you
| to think they do. The measurement is manipulated by the companies
| who do ad measurement (I work for one of these), because if the
| measurement makes the ads look bad, then Google (or whoever) will
| just find a different ad measurement company (very 2008 bond-
| rating-agency dynamic going on here). The publishers, of course
| don't mind inflated estimates of ad effectiveness, because the
| more successful advertising is on their platform, the more they
| can sell ad space for, and the more ad space they can sell. The
| marketers at the advertiser don't want accurate measurement--they
| want to look like last year's ad campaign did well because that's
| how the marketers get their annual bonuses. (We report results to
| the publishers, and the marketers at the advertisers. We should
| really be reporting to the CFO, because if you're a shareholder
| YOU ARE LOSING VALUE BECAUSE OF THE WASTE AND FRAUD IN THE AD
| ECOYSTEM.
|
| Want to learn more? Freakonomics Radio has a couple good shows on
| how advertising doesn't really work. Professor Kinshuk Jerath
| (Columbia University) has written recently about the misalignment
| of incentives in the advertising ecosystem (i.e., pubs don't care
| about inflated results; marketers don't either, and it's in the
| best interest of the ad measurer to look good). Professor Anna
| Tuchman (Northwestern University), et. al. have recently done a
| huge analysis of TV advertising, suggesting that its effects are
| an order of magnitude lower than the ad industry would have you
| believe.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I look forward to UBI making it more profitable to sell people
| the shit they already want, than try to farm up some new demand
| when there is already plenty.
| yalogin wrote:
| Advertising is not micropayment with low friction. That's like
| saying war is just the other country buying weapons for free.
|
| Advertising is an attempt at making the customer pay for stuff.
| Attention is free and so you cannot stop or prevent
| advertisements, they are a form of free speech if you will.
| However we are talking about the extent you go to profile users
| and tailor the ads to them. Google personalizes on a per user
| basis and everything they do is to get that data.
| alecbz wrote:
| What?
|
| > Advertising is an attempt at making the customer pay for
| stuff.
|
| Yeah that's who's supposed to be paying for things?
|
| It sounds like you're maybe alluding to a kind of advertising
| that's unavoidable by just existing in the world, like
| billboards or bus ads or something, but I don't think that's
| what we're talking about here.
|
| Or I guess a product that you don't know is going to have an
| ad, you use it, then bam an ad. Sure, in some way that's kind
| of like taking money without your consent.
|
| But once you know a product uses ads, you can just not use it
| because you don't like the way they charge you for it.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Everyone has a price.
| xxs wrote:
| but $900/month - that's just cheap
| vcryan wrote:
| I always come around to see the merits of a thing when it starts
| benefitting me.
| mgas wrote:
| This, and only this. He literally states "Fast forward two
| years and several pivots, and my slightly-less-early-stage
| business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads."
|
| I used to hate ads, until I started making money from ads. Now
| I am writing this fluff piece where I try to use rhetoric to
| re-frame the paradigm where I was once a disgruntled user, but
| now I am a profitable pusher.
|
| Particularly distasteful is the notion that "attention is a
| form of micropayment with low friction". If in the Library of
| Babel, all combinations of words are possible, I do not believe
| a more loathsome or self-serving bit of drivel could be found.
| rglullis wrote:
| $900/month seems a really low price to sell your soul.
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't really mind ads. I do mind;
|
| - being tracked around the internet without a very good reason
|
| - being lied to by advertisers that make spurious claims
|
| - adverts that use flashing/moving things to draw my attention
|
| - _anything_ that makes my computer make a sound when I might be
| somewhere quiet
|
| - anything that grossly wastes electricity or bandwidth
|
| - anything that's not related to the context of the page I'm
| looking at (see point 1)
|
| Ad platforms like Google AdSense's text adverts, or Carbon Ads,
| would be kind of OK if they didn't track the heck out of me. It's
| the ever-escalating attention war between content and ads that's
| the main problem. It started with "punch the monkey" ads that
| tricked people into clicking, and it's continuing with full-page-
| take-over-the-browser-video-ads now.
|
| Advertising is fine. Taking my full attention away from what I
| want to focus on without my permission is not.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Ugh honestly the text adverts are more annoying than banners
| and the like. It makes it feel like the _content of the site
| itself_ is being optimized for revenue, rather than being
| useful content. And god forbid you hover the wrong word and
| bring up a 400x400 popover telling you how great some product
| is.
|
| Maybe these aren't AdSense text adverts, but this was my
| general experience with text adverts as a whole.
| wruza wrote:
| You don't have to. Getting paid from something you disrespect is
| more or less okay and ubiquitous. It doesn't even have to be
| symmetrical. I bet that ads are the way they are not because ads
| bigcorps are 99% stupid, but because it actually 99% works better
| than we fantasize here about how nice and discovery ads could be.
| It doesn't work for you, but it probably does for average Joe, so
| put it on your site and use adblock.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| I have this theory that without ads 90% of the web as we know it
| would end immediately. And nothing of value would be lost.
|
| Without all the noise created by the web supported by ads it
| would be way easier to find what really interests me on the web:
| hobbyists and people that love to share information for the value
| of sharing alone. Not SEO optimized crapware with uncountable 5
| best this, 10 best that.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Who really cares if these shitty websites go away? I'd
| very much enjoy it if the web went back to its roots where
| people made a website because they actually had something to
| say instead of inflammatory clickbait bullshit designed to
| optimize "engagement". I don't even surf the web anymore, this
| is one of the few sites I still visit.
| superfrogged wrote:
| Why does every cereal commercial have to begin with some kind of
| industrial accident?
| alecbz wrote:
| So people are mostly talking about ads in general or hypocrisy,
| but I do think the author's point has some merit here.
| Frictionless payments and eliminating transaction overhead is a
| real benefit of ads, and I think one way to reduce reliance on
| ads would be to explore other avenues of addressing this problem.
|
| Like, riffing: you could maybe have some kind of automatic
| implicit patreon type thing. You sign up for "auto-patreon" and
| put $5/month in your account, you allow any site to charge up to
| $.10 a day, then you just browse the internet and sites will
| automatically charge you for usage.
| ericholscher wrote:
| Lots of people talking about how advertising is terrible in the
| comments here. Unfortunately, much of the internet is dependent
| on ads for revenue. I am personally working to improve the
| technology behind the ad ecosystem, so we can not worry so much
| about privacy and page performance, along with malware and other
| issues. I'd love to have more people working with us to improve
| things, rather than just commenting on how they are terrible.
|
| Unfortunately, advertising is never going to go away, unless you
| want to start paying for every newspaper or service online. So
| let's work to make it better.
|
| https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server &
| https://www.ethicalads.io/
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >So let's work to make it better.
|
| No.
| vortext wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it."
| tomcam wrote:
| > In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low
| friction.
|
| No. Modern targeting includes at least dozens, maybe hundreds of
| ways to surveil you without your knowledge or consent. A
| micropayment would transaction would include your full knowledge
| of what you were giving up in exchange for a commodity you
| consciously chose to pay for.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Advertising is a tax on the economy.
|
| Economy is like the forest. Companies are the trees and
| advertising they buy are the tree trunks.
|
| If they somehow cooperatively agreed to grow shorter trunks they
| would save so much nutrients. But since they compete with each
| other they need to grow as tall as it is physically possible, to
| avoid being overshadowed by others.
|
| Whole advertising industry should be nationalized and scaled back
| to non-profit that would mainly keep online and up to date a
| catalog of goods and services with dry data and test results.
| amoorthy wrote:
| My startup eschews ads and has a low cost subscription news
| service. However, both models work for different market segments.
|
| 1. The segment of users that doesn't really care about the
| quality of news and is happy to skim headlines is best served by
| ads. (This is the largest segment)
|
| 2. The segment of users who wants to be fully informed, as
| quickly as possible, is better served by a subscription.
| fumar wrote:
| There is little to distinguish paid advertising to content
| marketing or PR. Which both easily bleed into the larger media
| ecosystem. If you take a step back most of our experiences, even
| on HN, are from press releases or news articles driven largely by
| marketing. It works. I've spent over a 18 years understanding and
| working in the sector. You can't escape it. There is no
| centralized view on its ethical responsibilities. But there is no
| doubt that advertising and marketing and the media at large
| influence people and alter their behaviors.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| rambojazz wrote:
| TLDR: ads are annoying, but now I'm making a living from it so
| it's fine
| Sirikon wrote:
| So, your ability to have food every day depends on ads.
|
| You don't need mental gymnastics to justify surviving in a
| capitalist world using ads, it's okay, everyone understands it.
| tupac_speedrap wrote:
| Indeed. Why do people rationalise this stuff in such an odd
| way? Attention isn't currency and advertising isn't a foreign
| exchange. They mention about having a new "mental model" so
| mental gymnastics is probably an appropriate term in this case.
| zardo wrote:
| Start constructing your views from a foundation of, "I'm a
| good person. The things I do are good."
| NateEag wrote:
| One of the things traditional Christianity has going for it
| is that any adherent is supposed to accept, at core, that
| they are not an inherently good person.
|
| Doesn't mean everything you do is automatically terrible,
| but in many Christians it does encourage self-reflection
| and self-awareness, because of the knowledge that any given
| impulse you have may actually be a selfish one that's
| terrible for other people.
|
| ...granted, it doesn't always work that way in conservative
| US evangelicalism. Even there it does sometimes, though.
|
| /rabbittrail
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Ah well, the people who burned at the stake, only burned,
| because the inquisitors wanted to save their soul, so
| doing something good to them.
| NateEag wrote:
| The Inquisition was a truly horrible desecration against
| many unfortunate human beings.
|
| What I know of the Gospels makes me believe the
| Inquisitors were in no sense followers of Christ.
|
| (Of course, the Inquisition has nothing to do with the
| point I was making, but that point was itself a rabbit
| trail, so I suppose turnabout is fair play.)
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Indeed. And i don't care if they show ads or not. I will try to
| block it as much as possible, because i still hate watching
| those things.
| franciscop wrote:
| The mental loops the author jumps to justify/accept ads
| themselves is interesting. We agree any of these is bad:
|
| - I used to treat my employees well, but my agency was not
| sustainable with it so now I crank the whip every time someone
| wastes few minutes.
|
| - I used to sell fresh food, but my restaurant was not profitable
| so now I sell low quality food while claiming it's organic.
|
| Both of these are also clearly immoral, but in these fields it's
| clear that they don't become moral because of the profit factor.
| However the author seems to be saying because the business is not
| profitable that makes ads morally correct*? That doesn't seem
| good reasoning, I'm all for changing your own morality over time
| and each person having a custom set of rules but "profitability"
| is/should def not be what makes something moral or immoral.
|
| Maybe the author unknowingly had a more complex set of rules to
| define ads as moral under certain circumstances, maybe they just
| changed them, or maybe they are doing something they themselves
| consider immoral, but I find it strange to say profitability is
| part of moral.
|
| *Edit: actually the author doesn't talk about morality so these
| are more my rumblings/ideas based on the article than a correct
| review of the article. Probably because right now I have a
| somewhat strong moral belief, fairly weakly held, about ads and
| I'm thinking about similar questions as the author :)
| fleddr wrote:
| As you self-admitted, there's important nuances.
|
| When you say: "you can read all the content on my website for
| one year for $2".
|
| ...nobody will give you $2. Because they're conditioned that
| content is free. Because payment is a hassle. Because they may
| not know one year ahead what the value is.
|
| Same thing with games in the app store. A game you love and
| play a lot, clearly would be fairly priced at 5$. And still
| game developers are forced to make them free to play with in-
| game purchases to make up for it.
|
| People really do not want to pay for anything in the digital
| space. They won't pay a fixed fee, hate subscriptions too, and
| don't really donate at scale.
|
| As still people eagerly consume all this stuff anyway, I think
| the ethical point is incredibly one-sided if not hypocritical.
| You claim that the economic value is zero yet consume it
| anyway.
|
| Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No other
| successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads, they
| have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral ones.
|
| With no immediate successor on the horizon, I think ads should
| be redesigned to be less invasive. No excessive tracking, no
| absurd resource usage, and security protection.
| [deleted]
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No
| other successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads,
| they have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral
| ones.
|
| This is why I don't think the ethics are worth considering -
| this isn't a failing on individual users making personal
| choices. The ad industry has essentially made parts of the
| economy anticompetitive. Facebook and Google pick winners and
| losers via the ad market (whether intentionally or not),
| subsidized by private equity, which most of the actual
| producers of games do not want to participate in, but have no
| choice. Consumers may or may not be getting the best
| products, they are getting the products promoted by the ad
| industry.
|
| I don't see how any reasonable legislator or regulator can
| look at that situation as healthy, competitive or
| sustainable.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think steam and world of warcraft would say otherwise with
| respect to gaming. Most of my friends have large catalogues
| of $60+ games that they've bought on a whim and probably
| never played much.
| fleddr wrote:
| Yes, and people also pay for Netflix. But focusing on the
| exceptions is missing the forest for the trees.
| asoneth wrote:
| I agree with you that most internet content and mobile apps
| could not exist without advertising because they would not be
| profitable.
|
| But similar to D&D alignments, whether something is
| profitable is completely orthogonal to whether it is ethical.
| Human endeavors may be profitable but not ethical, ethical
| but not profitable, both profitable and ethical, or neither
| ethical nor profitable.
|
| So I share the parent commenter's concern about people who
| seem to be claiming that a thing must be ethical because it
| is necessary to be profitable. It's perfectly possible for a
| profitable thing to be profitable-good, profitable-neutral,
| or profitable-evil.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| > However the author seems to be saying because the business is
| not profitable that makes ads morally correct*?
|
| As your edit admits, this is not at all what I said. To expand
| a bit--I think there's a big distinction between advertisement
| in a fundamental sense and how advertisement often is
| implemented today. I think that advertising can be done in a
| good way, and I'm concerned that too many people dismiss
| advertising altogether because of things like real-time
| bidding.
| exyi wrote:
| So some advertising is ok, while the vast majority of online
| advertising today falls into the bad category? I think I
| could agree that advertising is acceptable if we'd have:
|
| * No personalisation * Full transparency (must be publicly
| available who is paying for this, ...) * No brainwashing,
| lies, propaganda, ... * No advertising of certain
| controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd
| define what's ok)
|
| Since we have basically no restrictions today on what is
| allowed, I'll still use ad blocker, advice everyone to do the
| same. And of course I'll rant how ads are bad on the
| internet.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| > So some advertising is ok, while the vast majority of
| online advertising today falls into the bad category?
|
| I have no idea, it's an extremely complicated problem,
| especially considering trade-offs between privacy and
| competition.
|
| > No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol,
| tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)
|
| That last bit is the kicker ;).
| xmonkee wrote:
| You never really answered the question "Why I changed my
| mind" in your post. You adopted a new model and that allows
| you to look at advertising favorably, but why you made that
| change in the first place isn't clear. Advertising hasn't
| changed, nor did you discover any new information about it.
|
| Your post reminds me of a friend who was an ardent Bernie
| Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries, until Bernie lost to
| Hillary, and this man became a huge Hillary champion
| overnight. It wasn't enough for him to vote for an odious
| candidate for practical reasons. Now, Hillary was always the
| best candidate because she's very "qualified" or "details
| oriented". Nothing about Hillary changed, nor did he learn
| any new information about her. But he changed his mental
| model of Hillary to support his "change of mind".
| taurath wrote:
| To your credit I agree that it takes a particular type of
| person to be very thoughtful about ads but not have any thought
| whatsoever on their morality but rather in their utility.
|
| How anyone can look around with even the foggiest of eyes at
| the current incentive structures around ads and say "this is
| providing a moral and helpful service" is a bit beyond me.
| projektfu wrote:
| It turns out that the employees prefer the whip and before that
| they complained about not being paid enough. And new studies
| show that organic food is not particularly different and the
| suppliers are lying anyway, so people really just want to feel
| good about what they're buying. /s
| jqcoffey wrote:
| My small input to this debate: I know I certainly bought---
| actually paid for---magazines like Computer Shopper just to
| browse the ads. I think many folks on HN of my generation likely
| did the same.
| btdmaster wrote:
| Advertising is fundamentally waste -- if everyone spends the same
| amount of resources on advertising, no gains are made but a lot
| of resources are spent. How can this be justified?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Well, good luck not going down the slippery slope of slowly
| changing your services to whatever will maximize engagement and
| deliver the most ads to the most eyeballs, regardless of how
| healthy this user engagement is, dude.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| You're assuming there will never be competition in his niche or
| that he will somehow discover a way to maintain a monopoly.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'm assuming that he is running an ad-supported business on
| the Internet, and will be subject to the same temptations
| that everyone who runs an ad-supported business on the
| Internet are subject to. Perhaps he will manage to avoid
| these temptations, especially if his thing makes enough to
| give him a comfortable profit without courting VC and its
| demands to pivot into whatever model results in the most
| unicorns flying through the air on jets of cash expelled out
| of their buttholes. Perhaps he will not.
| etempleton wrote:
| People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for
| things. There is a happy medium where good advertising can
| subsidize things people only kind of want to pay for.
|
| People are largely indifferent or sometimes like good
| advertising. Super Bowl ads, for example, often draw as much of a
| crowd as the game itself because the ads are well produced and
| entertaining. The problem is there is always pressure to make
| more and more money and eventually that leads to bad practices in
| advertising.
|
| Examples of Bad Advertising:
|
| - Popups or other types of digital ads that compromise the user
| experience - Privacy compromising tracking - Misleading / false
| advertising - Over-saturation of advertising - Outdoor ads that
| block a beautiful view
|
| The whole digital advertising landscape, unfortunately, is filled
| with some of the worst advertising we have seen in the modern
| era. The ads are sold too cheaply and at too high of a volume
| causing over saturation.
| perlgeek wrote:
| What are examples of good advertising then?
|
| I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't
| always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an
| advertiser, with the following features:
|
| * it's a different interview each episode
|
| * many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff.
| For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some
| recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they
| observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good
| advertising for them.
|
| * I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't
| just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast
|
| Now that is a _lot_ of effort both for the producer and for the
| advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several
| years, so it seems to work.
|
| ---
|
| The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview
| for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small
| podcast. You really need something bigger to make it
| worthwhile.
|
| The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising.
| Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more.
| Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial.
|
| What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know,
| the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying
| ads.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Covid lockdowns shifted attitudes about wfh so significantly.
|
| I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where
| all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy
| things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways.
| Would be really interesting to see what would happen after
| the prohibition was lifted.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for
| things.
|
| People hate _having to put effort or risk into paying for
| things_. Online payment was ridiculously blasted with friction
| even before PSD2 hit thanks to all the fraud going on, now it
| 's even worse. Not to mention you can't just go and pay 10-50
| cents to view a single online news article behind a paywall -
| the papers _all_ want your personal data to upsell you, don 't
| offer non-subscription models, and make bailing out of
| subscriptions _ridiculously_ hard. And the credit card industry
| wants their cut on top, too, which makes micropayments even
| more expensive to offer.
|
| How did iTunes, Spotify and Netflix get so big and essentially
| killed piracy in their respective markets? They offered an
| easy, risk-free way for consumers to access content they want.
| Everyone else - _particularly_ news media - hasn 't gotten the
| hint yet.
|
| How to fix it? I think the situation needs to be fixed from two
| sides:
|
| First is obviously banking. There should absolutely be an
| international (!) instant banking network - I'm thinking about
| something like expanding SEPA Instant payments, but specialized
| on nano-transactions, and correspondingly low fees. Then, a
| bank issues auth tokens that allow a set budget of
| micropayments to users; their browsers then upon authentication
| (e.g. fingerprint or user's password) automatically emit a
| micropayment transaction - basically, the user visits a paywall
| site, an OS/browser dialog pops up that asks for confirmation
| to pay e.g. 10 cents to the New York Times, the user presses
| their finger on Touch ID, and a second later the NYT has their
| ten cents and I can read the article.
|
| The other side is content authors themselves. They _absolutely_
| need to get rid of the need to know everything about their
| customer and to lock them in. Provide good content and the
| people will come.
| etempleton wrote:
| Written media hasn't figured it out yet. Though NYTimes is
| trying to get there with their recent acquisitions. I would
| pay 10-15 bucks a month to access a lot of quality written
| content, but print charges more and is more limited in the
| amount of content you receive. And it feels like you should
| have access to everything when you are on the internet.
| Hitting a paywall when trying to read a 500 word article is a
| bad feeling.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, how to actually fund decent journalism?
| Quality journalism costs money, and personally I pay about
| 40EUR in total a month for a selection of quality media.
|
| Crap journalism - and I'm not just talking about clickbait
| of the Buzzfeed style, but especially right-wing-leaning
| rags - in contrast are funded by dark or enemy government
| money, so they can publish their crap without needing
| paywalls... which leads to people drifting towards these
| for getting their news.
|
| Austria has experimented with a different system, in
| contrast: there, the government pays a ton of money in
| advertising, so newspapers are essentially free - but at
| the cost of corruption like the scandal that (thankfully)
| caused the demise of the former Chancellor Kurz.
| tpoacher wrote:
| If you're happy to define "working in exchange for wages" as
| "slavery", then yes, I've also changed my mind about slavery too.
|
| Trouble is, very few people would accept that strawman definition
| as the extant one.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Humans are not very rational, to our detriment. Most
| advertisements make use of logical fallacies to convince people
| they need a product. Most advertisements are therefore mentally
| unhealthy both because they actively deceive people and because
| they lower the sanity line in public discourse by getting people
| used to believing bullshit unquestioningly which makes them more
| vulnerable to propaganda.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| Ads aren't a problem if there are multiple competing services to
| choose from. If customers care about the ad-related UX then
| they'll switch to a better competitor. The problem is monopoly
| (as usual).
|
| I recently switched to a new tech publication because the old one
| had a "page jumping" problem (related to ads) that they didn't
| fix for a while even after I sent them a message. No big deal -
| this is how a good market works.
|
| Another problem is bad discovery mechanisms. Google search should
| de-rank pages with to many spammy ads, but that's not in their
| interests due to their control of the ads ecosystem. This does
| kind of come back to being a monopoly problem.
|
| A cool feature of ads that's not mentioned in the blog post is
| that they automatically price discriminate. Rich people
| effectively pay more and subsidise the content for those from
| developing countries. This probably angers rich people more
| because they (somewhat subconsciously) value their attention at a
| rate which makes the content seem expensive.
|
| Of course, there are still problems to solve with malware,
| excessive tracking, etc. but these don't seem intractable.
| jarbus wrote:
| I'd be curious if the author uses ad-blocker
| abracadaniel wrote:
| Attention as a currency is an interesting mental model to
| approach it from, but I think it makes advertising look even more
| unethical.
|
| There's no contract for my attention, no agreement for me to pay.
| It makes ad supported sites less like a museum with a suggested
| donation box, and more like a museum with a pickpocket. Their
| business model may rely on that stolen money, but that doesn't
| mean it's okay.
|
| This also has me thinking about the monetary cost of ads to the
| viewer. Ads consume my time, my electricity, and wear and tear on
| computer components. It may be a faction of a penny, but ads only
| bring in a fraction of a penny. All without my permission.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Author: Ads are annoying but money is nice and I like money more
| than my sworn principles. lmao
| [deleted]
| mindcrime wrote:
| Where did he ever say anything about a "sworn principle"
| against ads? All I see is this:
|
| _I believed that in addition to being annoying, it was
| unnecessary--that if for some reason advertising became
| infeasible, sure, some companies would go out of business, but
| they 'd be replaced by better companies with other business
| models, and the rest of us would be better off for it._
|
| So basically "ads are annoying and unnecessary". Changing that
| opinion is not exactly some dramatic change in fundamental
| principles.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Read his previous articles or comments on hackernews. Stop
| crying if you don't even look 2 inches further than your
| mouse pointer.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I'm not engaging in some elaborate research project here.
| This isn't that important. If the guy has previous
| statements about a "sworn principle" against advertising
| then good for him I guess. But it's not in the article
| we're discussing now.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| I am not discussing the article. I made a comment about
| the Authors stance on advertising.
| asciimov wrote:
| As someone who lost a day of work because a clever ad prompted my
| partner to install malware (it looked like an official Adobe
| Flash update), I'll continue blocking most ads for the
| foreseeable future.
|
| The only ads that I don't block are banner ads posted by small
| time websites. For example, a sports blog for my almamater hosts
| their own local ads. I don't block those because all their ads
| are image banners with a link to local to the university
| businesses.
| [deleted]
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| > When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product,"
| you are the customer.
|
| That isn't really true though. The company that uses an ad-
| supported model can't pay its bill with a user's attention, it
| pays its bill with the revenue it gets from funneling those users
| into clicking on ads. The author can try to redefine what a
| customer and a product is, but the bottom line is that they are
| receiving money in exchange for ad clicks, which means their
| customers are the ad company, and the product are the clicks.
| This whole article reads like the author is trying to cope with
| the fact that they are willing to do the thing that actively
| makes their product worse, if it means they get more money.
|
| I haven't changed my mind about advertising, even if it means my
| project will always operate at a loss, I'm prepared for that.
| People that want to support it can subscribe to the Patreon, and
| they get some extra stuff, but I'm not going to try and monetize
| bot traffic by stuffing my pages full of ads.
| harryvederci wrote:
| This reads to me as: "I couldn't make money from my business
| without ads, so now I think ads are okay."
|
| I've been living advertisement-free since 2010. My mother thinks
| she's immune to advertisments. Her reasoning is that ads are so
| annoying, they'll have the opposite effect on her.
|
| I respect her line of thinking, but a while back when we
| discussed ads, I asked her the following question:
|
| "How often do you think about buying something?"
|
| She thought about multiple times per week, probably even multiple
| times per day.
|
| She asked me the same question, and I had to dig really deep to
| finally answer:
|
| "I haven't thought about buying something other than groceries
| for months."
| lol1lol wrote:
| except I've no control over what I am attending
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Flowers are also advertising. Flowers are usually considered
| beautiful and a good thing. It follows that advertising is not
| categorically bad.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It depends.
|
| Flowers blossom to attract insects in exchange for nectar. You
| might call this good advertisement.
|
| But there are plants who "advertise" like flowers who have
| nectar, but really don't. So they trick the insects into
| visiting them to spread their pollen, but they do notngive
| nectqr in return.
| Jsharm wrote:
| I'm no fan of ads either but one undeniable benefit is equality;
| if Google cost money to use then those in poverty would simply be
| unable to use it. The service is paid for by the wealthiest (as
| these are the most valuable eyeballs to advertisers anyway).
| danShumway wrote:
| > When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product,"
| you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service
| trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for
| regular currency
|
| But this is exactly what we meant when we said that you are the
| product. Your attention is being sold to advertisers, under the
| assumption that it will be converted into regular currency in the
| form of influencing your purchasing decisions.
|
| ----
|
| I'm not going to jump on the hate wagon, if the author changed
| their mind, fine. There are more constructive ways to engage than
| calling them a traitor. But this sentence really confuses me,
| it's like saying, "you're not the product, your blood is." What
| did you used to mean when you said that the user was the product,
| if not that the user's own presence and mental state was being
| sold?
|
| It's also worth noting (and doesn't get brought up that often)
| that advertisers only care about consumer attention because it
| gets converted through roundabout processes into consumer
| spending. The whole of the advertising model relies on the idea
| that being able to get people's attention allows advertisers to
| change what consumers buy. Even the most innocent, ethical forms
| of advertising where people are genuinely being made aware of a
| product that they didn't know existed and that solves one of
| their needs still operates under this premise. What advertising
| does is it directly sells people's attention, and indirectly
| sells people's purchasing decisions.
|
| This is exactly why some people like me are so anti-advertising
| in its current online form. Sites need to maximize attention so
| that they can siphon some of that attention towards a product.
| This leads to some bad outcomes in what content gets produced,
| and I personally believe it leads to bad outcomes overall for
| society -- I think it leads to a situation where people are
| constantly having their concentration/focus/awareness drained
| from them. This is (in my mind) exacerbated by the fact that
| advertising is often omnipresent rather than the result of a
| conscious decision to "spend" attention. With money, you get a
| purchase screen. With ads, they just kind of show up in your
| regular life. The advertising model often takes the form of ads
| inserting themselves into other unrelated activities without
| explicit permission or any explicit contract with the consumer.
|
| Going back to the blood analogy, if a normal monetary model is
| kind of like getting blood drawn and selling it, advertising is
| more like mosquitoes. Advertisers show up where you want to be,
| and while you're doing other things they suck your blood; there's
| very rarely an explicit transactional step where you decide to
| give them your blood, and the only way to get rid of them is to
| either not go into certain places at all or to block them as best
| as you can.
|
| ----
|
| Again, I don't want to just jump on the author and make them feel
| bad. It's good for someone to write a piece like this and try to
| think through why they're doing the things they do and to
| describe how they feel about advertising. It's better for this
| piece to be written then for the author to just ignore the
| disconnect. And I'll also push back on some of the blanket
| criticisms, because ads as micropayments is also a good way of
| looking at why the advertising industry has thrived online. I
| think that is a really good insight, I have often complained that
| one of the things holding back the web is the absence of a good,
| low-fee, (it feels weird to use word this in relation to ads, but
| we're talking comparatively here) "private" micropayments system
| (and no, cryptocurrency is not currently solving this problem).
|
| However, ultimately I find the arguments in this piece really
| uncompelling, and they don't capture why I oppose advertising in
| the first place. I'm not necessarily saying that paying via
| attention is _always_ wrong, nor am I saying that consumers never
| want to know about new products. However, the way the advertising
| industry currently operates is (I believe) bad for society on an
| almost fundamental level, and making those ads less invasive or
| making them more private doesn 't really solve the problem. Even
| if you look at a browser like Brave, Brave is trying to tackle
| privacy issues with advertising, but it's not tackling the more
| fundamental issue that an omnipresent monetization of attention
| is toxic for society.
|
| This article doesn't offer any strong reasoning as to why I
| should change my mind about that. I already knew ads monetize
| attention, that's one of the biggest parts about them that I
| don't like.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Fast forward two years and several pivots, and my slightly-
| less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue...
| from ads._
|
| This entire piece just feels like someone trying to rationalize
| their choice to do something they previously considered yucky,
| because that thing turns out to be lucrative.
|
| > _In particular, attention is a form of micropayment with low
| friction._
|
| This is an interesting way of framing it, one I am surprised I
| actually like.
|
| When framed this way, it's easier for me to coherently say "I
| don't agree to use this payment method". I say that by using an
| ad blocker. And if you still give me the content of your site,
| despite the presence of the ad blocker, that's on you.
|
| This framing does have flaws. A traditional payment goes through
| some kind of order and confirmation flow. "Taking my payment" --
| i.e. foisting ads upon me -- before confirming I am ok paying
| that way, is not ok. I'd be fine with a page that popped up a
| modal saying "This site requires payment in the form of attention
| (advertisements). Click 'Accept' if you agree to these terms." I
| would be happy to see sites being up-front with that, so I can
| choose to close the browser tab rather than waste my attention.
| (Sites with ad-blocker blockers more or less do this, and I'm
| fine not consuming their content.)
|
| I get that cash micropayments have all sorts of problems, but I
| do wish that was at least a viable option.
|
| > _This doesn 't address more salient concerns with advertising,
| like sharing data with 3rd parties or the question of if it
| pushes companies to maximize for engagement more than they
| otherwise would._
|
| While I agree those are big problems, for me, the problem is that
| I see advertising as a form of mental and emotional manipulation.
| I don't want to be treated like someone who must be manipulated
| into purchasing something, even if it is something that I need or
| would find genuinely useful.
|
| Having said that, I'm not sure how our economic system would look
| if all advertising (not just online) were banned. Our economic
| system depends on consumerism, and no advertising would severely
| damage sellers' ability to get consumers to open their wallets.
| Not saying that would be a bad thing, but it would certainly
| cause a huge upheaval, which could be painful for a lot of
| people, at least for a time.
| nononononon1425 wrote:
| mdoms wrote:
| Well you see it benefits me now.
| nyxtom wrote:
| Targeted advertising isn't all that bad if it provides useful
| choice in an otherwise crowded market. Where I disagree with the
| premise is when advertising becomes predatory in a lot of ways is
| when it preys on psychology and emotion - particularly disgust,
| anger, distrust in some cases.
| wzdd wrote:
| > You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that
| attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency.
|
| This is a very superficial take. You obviously don't _just_ pay
| with attention. You also pay with actual money -- you do, or the
| friends or family you talk about the product with do. And you don
| 't necessarily do it completely consciously, because one of the
| effects of "raise awareness" advertising is to make things that
| are familiar to you seem more attractive. Given three equivalent
| options, one of which you vaguely remember from somewhere, you're
| more likely to pick that option.
|
| One could of course argue about whether this payment (using
| actual money) is good or not, and whether using advertising in
| this way is ethical, but extracting money from you or your social
| network is the end goal.
|
| Somewhat-unbelievable arguments about advertising as a whole
| being a con aside, if people weren't responding to advertising by
| increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
| amalcon wrote:
| Right, the attention is only valuable as a way to get to your
| money. If we somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases, it
| would seem to be better[0] to just pay with the same amount of
| money. That would free up a bunch of attention that was being
| destroyed to redirect the flow of money. That attention could
| be used to do self-directed research into products and services
| that you might value ("pull advertising"). On net, this would
| be far less predatory and more pleasant.
|
| Of course, we can't somehow eliminate all of the cognitive
| biases involved. Pretending we can leads to ludicrous
| conclusions like mine here: obviously the world is never
| actually going to work in this way. I think the closest we
| might get would be to clean up certain types of predatory
| advertising, maybe starting with anything aimed at young
| children. Which is of course what most of the world has been
| trying (and, to a limited extent, succeeding at) for decades.
|
| [0]- There is a credible argument here that the advertising
| model allows people with more money to subsidize people with
| less money, but since we have a magic bias-removal wand in this
| hypothetical, it's still more efficient to just do that
| directly.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > You obviously don't _just_ pay with attention.
|
| Nobody _ever_ pays with attention. This is a total nonsense
| idea created by the advertisers to justify their own existence
| and guilt people who don 't accept their noise. It's an attempt
| to frame us as thiefs and just as dishonest as the copyright
| industry comparing infringement to high seas piracy.
|
| Payment is when we exchange money for something else. It's a
| transaction: can't have one without the other. Advertising is
| when the company sends us stuff _for free_ while _hoping_ that
| we 'll see the noise they bundled alongside it. Absolutely
| nothing stops us from just filtering that noise. They were
| _hoping_ to inject some brands into our minds but their attempt
| failed. Too bad, they need to suck it up and stop whining.
| Nowhere is it written that we must bend over backwards to make
| that happen. They don 't get to complain about it because
| nobody owes them a single thing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Paying with attention also means paying with time, which is
| arguably worse than money because time is lost forever. Also,
| having to pay attention to an ad breaks your focus and flow,
| and therefore adversely affects what you actually want to do.
| alecbz wrote:
| This is a really good point. The only reason your attention is
| valuable is because it is (on average) going to cause you to
| spend enough money to actually pay for the product, but in a
| sneaky way you won't quite notice and won't associate with the
| product itself.
| the8472 wrote:
| > if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing
| advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
|
| Not necessarily, it could also be a red queen's race. But that
| also is a net-negative since money gets spent on advertising
| instead of passing the savings through to the consumer.
| [deleted]
| charonn0 wrote:
| > When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product,"
| you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service
| trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for
| regular currency.
|
| The problem with this view point is that it's not _just_ our
| attention that 's being taken. If it were then the notion that
| "you are the product" wouldn't have gained such currency in the
| first place.
| quxpar wrote:
| The problem with attention as a form of currency is that people
| are, almost definitionally, not aware when it is being taken from
| them.
| mcherm wrote:
| That doesn't HAVE to be true.
|
| Consider a newspaper with articles and ads. The customer is
| absolutely aware of the attention currency when there are
| articles side-by-side with ads. And the customer may decide NOT
| to pick up the free local "paper" in the supermarket bin that's
| 80% ads with only a few articles.
|
| On the other hand, when there are ads that are formatted like
| articles, but with a little disclaimer ("This is a paid
| advertisement"). Those can be confusing. Better newspapers will
| do things like using a black border or requiring a different
| font to make it easier for customers to tell the difference.
| Finally, there are articles written by the newspaper's
| journalists about a topic chosen by an advertiser -- those are
| VERY subtle and confusing to the customer.
|
| I presume you can on your own extend this metaphor from
| newspapers to the Web.
| chaostheory wrote:
| What people in the HN bubble don't often think about is that not
| every user can pay without advertising. Many people in the world
| cannot afford to pay for a service with money. Donations only go
| so far in supporting these types of services.
| mvkel wrote:
| So I guess this guy is saying his moral code is worth $900/m?
|
| I'm personally not against ad/user data companies, but for
| someone who is to be convinced otherwise for $10K/year is ...
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| So the author was anti-advertising as a consumer, but now is pro-
| advertising as an advertiser. Sounds about right.
| wpietri wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton
| Sinclair
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean the less-cynical take is now that the author actually
| understands the reality of the business instead of the warped
| outsider's perception it doesn't seem half as evil as he was
| made to believe. I can respect that.
| tomp wrote:
| The best kind of businesses are those where the pipeline is
| distributed and each participant can keep telling themselves
| they're definitely the good guys.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| A counter-anecdote: I went into the advertising field neutral
| to the profession, and the more I learned about it the more I
| disliked it, to the point of disdain. Leaving the industry
| was the best career choice I've ever made. It's an abusive
| industry that somehow manages to be very self-congratulatory.
|
| The saddest part of this for me is that there are some
| incredibly talented people wasting all their energy making
| ads for oil companies and health insurers. Though, I suppose
| that happens everywhere... everyone needs to make a buck.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yup. I consulted for an advertiser for a while. "Never
| again," said I.
|
| I think of it as a filtering function. Many people go in.
| But the ones who stay are the ones ok making a living from
| manipulating folks to do whatever people with money want.
| danachow wrote:
| The outsider perspective of (especially online) advertising
| or for those that work with it is _overtly_ rotten and "evil"
| - it's doesn't follow that somehow it's better on the inside.
| It isn't a sausage factory, it's a sewage treatment plant.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Anecdote unrelated to your point:
|
| I've grown up close to a sewage treatment plant and have
| been taken on a couple hours' tour of it in middle school.
| And what do you know, while there is a faint odour in the
| air (much weaker than, say, near a barn or a stable, but
| it's there), it's one of the most sparkling-clean,
| meticulously organized workplaces I've seen before or
| since. I've been to chemistry labs with worse plumbing and
| more clutter than that, let alone industrial facilities.
|
| I mean, it's not that surprising in hindsight--if it's
| clean everything or drown in literal shit, you bet it's
| going to be clean. But it's definitely not what I expected.
| (Probably helps they didn't get their funding or wages cut
| while the surrounding country was falling apart, chemistry
| labs and all, for the same reason.)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I highly respect the workers of sewage treatment plants,
| because I could never work there, without having my smell
| sense removed.
|
| But there are differences to the plants, I think you can
| make them enclosed and allmost smell less. But the one in
| my area does not have that tech and they stink.
| badRNG wrote:
| He directly acknowledges that his piece doesn't address "more
| salient concerns with advertising," and I'd go as far as to
| say it doesn't address any of the biggest concerns. Insert
| some variation of "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand
| Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding
| It" here.
| [deleted]
| andrewzah wrote:
| There's a term for changing your opinion because you now realize
| you can profit from it. Unprincipled.
| [deleted]
| randcraw wrote:
| Mercenary. Machiavellian. Exploitative. Thief.
|
| There are LOTS of terms for turning customers into victims.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This is just a long way to say, "I decided I like money more than
| I dislike ads"
| hedora wrote:
| Cattle aren't the product. They pay for their feed with delicious
| cheeseburgers.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wonder how much I would change my mind about if I were making
| $900/month from it.
|
| Maybe I'd decide that gas leafblowers weren't all that bad.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| "I've changed my mind because my income depends on it and I don't
| want to feel like the bad guy"
| nnamtr wrote:
| Probably true, but I suppose it's some sort of cognitive bias
| rather than a conscious thought out of greed or similar
| motives.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you ask people pointed enough questions, you'll soon find
| that their "subconscious" reasoning is just conscious
| reasoning that they don't attribute to themselves.
| NateEag wrote:
| s/don't attribute to/aren't aware of/
| wpietri wrote:
| Or have chosen to not be aware of. We live in an age of
| abundant information with many opportunities for pursuing
| self-awareness. But people are very good at avoiding
| thinking about things that would make them feel cognitive
| dissonance.
|
| E.g., look at religion. They can't all be correct. Fully
| rational people would surely want to get something so
| important right, so they'd work hard to discover the
| sources of confusion and sort things out. Instead we see
| religions and religious factions multiply. Thanks to
| fMRIs, we can even see that "what god wants" is just
| people "unconsciously" reading their own preferences:
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-
| god-i...
| NateEag wrote:
| Sure, makes sense, and fits cleanly into the substitution
| I proposed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Not even. If you don't take the roundabout route, they
| will definitely often use what Wikipedia calls "weasel
| words" to directly explain their thinking, in "plenty of"
| other anonymous people's mouths, in the passive voice.
| NateEag wrote:
| I expect that happens plenty, but there is such a thing
| as the subconscious, and I don't think _everyone_ who
| lacks a full understanding of their own mind is operating
| in bad faith.
| sneak wrote:
| The classic quote on the topic is from Upton Sinclair:
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
| his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
| williamtrask wrote:
| And he misses the point. Ask yourself what's the difference
| between an ad engine and a recommender engine?
|
| In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your
| quality of life is at the top.
|
| In an ad engine... that list gets resorted
|
| Advertising's true cost is opportunity cost. It's the lost
| opportunity of knowing the actual best option for your quality
| of life.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I'm not trying to defend ads in general, but one problem that
| a recommender engine certainly suffers from is how to deal
| with a new entity. How do you make a new entrant gets into
| that list even though, while they may provide value, there's
| currently no evidence of that are far as the recommender is
| concerned?
| cf wrote:
| While often ignored, item-to-item similarity recommenders
| work really well for new items and have been the basis for
| Amazon's and YouTube's early recommendation algorithms
|
| https://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/02/youtube-uses-amazons-
| re...
| lostcolony wrote:
| I think you may be misunderstanding the parent (I may
| also be misunderstanding though) - they're saying that
| with a new user (not a new product), you have no
| information for providing recommendations to them; you
| have no idea what they're interested in.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I was talking about new products/movies/whatever, not
| users. Sorry, "new entity" was too vague in retrospect.
|
| My point was around the utility of marketing, at least in
| theory. If I release a new brand of baked beans, how
| would a recommender based on past sales (and combinations
| of sales) know to recommend it to anyone. Marketing
| allows it to go up the list (unfairly, according to the
| post I was replying to).
| williamtrask wrote:
| This is also a problem ad engines face. Non-unique to
| recommenders.
| danShumway wrote:
| One (partial) way of looking at it is that modern advertising
| is a recommendation engine, but just reworked to be
| adversarial.
|
| Because consumers know that advertising is an adversarial
| recommendation engine, restricting ads to a single place
| (like Google searches) isn't really feasible for the entire
| industry -- comparatively fewer people would visit that
| recommendation list because a large portion of them know that
| the recommendation list is adversarial.
|
| So, modern advertisers are left with two options:
|
| 1. Insert their recommendation engine into other activities
| that users want to engage with (ads inside of or alongside
| other content).
|
| 2. Try to convince users that a portal for doing searches on
| their recommendation engine is actually a non-adversarial
| recommendation engine (recommendation engines where it's not
| always immediately obvious that advertisers can pay to
| influence results).
|
| Closely related to 2 is in pairing their adversarial
| recommendation engine with a non-adversarial engine making it
| _somewhat_ adversarial, but not so adversarial that users are
| willing to leave. For example, Google Maps does legitimately
| tell you about businesses nearby. It also combines ads into
| that system that are adversarial and that try to get you to
| buy things against your own best interest. But it 's not so
| adversarial that the average user views it as useless, it
| still sort of works as a search engine. It's still food, it's
| just a little bit more poisonous than normal: enough to harm
| you a little bit, but not enough to kill you or to prompt you
| to stop eating it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In a perfect market economy, those two lists are equal.
|
| Thats because the company who produces the product you are
| most interested in can afford to spend the most on ads.
| Products you aren't very interested in, either because they
| cost too much, or aren't up to your standards, you are
| unlikely to buy, and therefore those manufacturers won't be
| able to afford to get to the top ad spot.
|
| In reality, this doesn't work because the market is far from
| perfect, and the amount of margin a company has on a product
| to spend on advertising widely varies.
| wpietri wrote:
| "Perfect market" is a technical term meaning one where
| "buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that
| monopoly is absent and market prices cannot be
| manipulated". A perfect market would not help this problem.
|
| The notion that perfect realizations of Econ 101 concepts
| would produce outcomes everybody likes it both wrong and
| quasi-religious. It's like saying, "The perfect knife would
| never cut a human." Nope.
|
| If anything, the whole purpose of advertising is to create
| market distortions. Look at Coke vs Pepsi, for example.
| Billions are spent yearly to manipulate consumers to make
| choices that differ from whatever the natural marketplace
| outcome would be.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| What's more, even in a perfect market as you describe,
| advertising will only ever represent the subset of the
| solution space for any given problem that involves spending
| money. With how powerful a voice advertising has, we end up
| training people to deal with problems by buying rather than
| doing/learning/making.
|
| In a perfect market, the top ad would be for the best
| treadmill. You'd never see an ad for just going outside for
| a run.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In a totally perfect market, the park charges runners a
| few cents to go for a run, and spends some of that
| revenue on advertising the park to runners, and then they
| would outcompete treadmill ads (for some users).
|
| The reason you don't see this is because free parks are
| themselves a market distortion.
| naasking wrote:
| > In a recommender engine, the best recommendation for your
| quality of life is at the top. In an ad engine... that list
| gets resorted
|
| A recommender engine in principle could avoid recommending
| things that are unhealthy. Advertising has no such
| guardrails. It recommends things that reflect _someone else
| 's_ economic incentives, and not what's actually best for me.
| abakker wrote:
| Exactly - there are many ads for products which are
| unhealthy, dangerous, or just very low quality. All of us
| have probably bought some in each category and regretted
| it.
| [deleted]
| it_does_follow wrote:
| > my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month
| in revenue... from ads.
|
| It doesn't take much to convert him either!
|
| Initially I thought his argument was "I thought using ads
| doesn't bring any revenue, but now I'm paying for ads and
| making a net $900" which at least would argue some evidence
| that using advertising is not useless.
|
| However it seems like he's just getting paid $900/month to run
| ads... so in this case he could have been correct in the
| beginning and just changed his mind because he's on the winning
| end of a scam. Not saying that advertising doesn't work, just
| that his position provides no evidence for that.
| delegate wrote:
| Advertising is not a 'foreign exchange for attention currency'
| (metaphor used by author).
|
| On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and commodification
| of well told lies. But that isn't the real problem - the real
| problem with advertising is that it works.
|
| Why is that a problem ?
|
| Because advertising is manufactured demand.
|
| Last time I looked at the 'Law of Supply and Demand' on Wikipedia
| some time ago, the word 'advertising' appeared 0 times in there.
| I've just checked, the word is there 1 time as the 6th item in a
| list. I think it deserves way more attention (pun intended) in
| the economic theory.
|
| Just look at that simple chart. A positive shift in demand
| results in an increase in price and quantity sold of the product.
|
| In other words, you can make people consume considerably more
| stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.
|
| Given that 'stuff' are nature converted into object we
| temporarily use and discard, the result of this macroeconomic
| ideology - destruction of nature and change of climate in half a
| century.
|
| We all know the names of the big tech companies who are
| exceedingly efficient at pushing up the global demand curve.
|
| This business model really needs to stop.
| andrepd wrote:
| Thanks for summing up my thoughts exactly. I'm radically anti-
| advertisement for these reasons exactly. The world would be a
| much better place without ads.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Babies and bathwater, here. Many people legitimately would like
| to have Thing/Service but don't know it exists, and may even
| not realize the possibility of other options exists.
| danenania wrote:
| Yeah. Along the same lines, anyone who has ever attempted to
| start a business knows that advertising in various ways is
| essential.
|
| If you banned all advertising, you'd be doing a huge favor to
| the largest, most established companies--the ones that
| already have high brand awareness.
|
| As much as ads suck, they also provide a relatively
| democratic form of access to markets for new entrants.
| Without them, the only hope is going viral organically, which
| is more or less equivalent to winning the lottery.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Many people legitimately would like to have Thing/Service
| but don't know it exists
|
| Sorry to burst the bubble, but that's *the proof that adv is
| manufactured demand*!
|
| People interested in having something will find a way to know
| about them.
|
| I think people are confusing the idea of advertising (AKA
| publicizing) their products or skills, with the advertising
| market we have today.
|
| They are not the same thing, they only share the same name,
| for historical reasons.
|
| It's like comparing Risk with WW2.
|
| 21st century advertising is nothing but bad news.
|
| If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that sells
| them.
|
| If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily,
| because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most
| probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is
| wearing them)
| cglace wrote:
| You are describing how you want the world to be. Can you
| accept that other people might like being introduced to new
| products?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > People interested in having something will find a way to
| know about them.
|
| Ouch. This couldn't be more wrong. Throughout my life, I've
| met so many people who wanted something and didn't find it
| by trying very hard. _Sometimes_ , they finally find it via
| an ad. Ads definitely helped them.
| rackjack wrote:
| Agreed. Anybody who's into an obscure music genre can
| attest to how hard it is to find such music, let alone
| finding good ones.
| com2kid wrote:
| I have problems with back pain (I sit all day typing, not
| too surprising)
|
| Facebook ad for stretching program for back pain shows up a
| few times. I eventually decide to buy it.
|
| It works, resolves my back pain.
|
| I had a real problem, a solution was advertised to me, I
| bought it, and it worked.
|
| No induced demand.
| andrepd wrote:
| For each ad for a legitimate back pain remedy, how many
| hoax ones do you think there are? 9? 99? 999?
| sanedigital wrote:
| > People interested in having something will find a way to
| know about them.
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| This is might be true with commodity products, but with
| disruptive products--the kind most people here are
| producing or selling--that's absolutely not the case.
|
| > If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily,
| because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most
| probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is
| wearing them).
|
| Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling. Some of those
| needs are caused by problems the individual isn't
| consciously aware of. Some of them are caused by problems
| the individual is aware of, but isn't aware of the
| available solutions. Marketing that seeks to educate the
| individual about the solutions available to them is a net-
| positive, both for the consumer and the producer.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > [Citation needed]
|
| You are the one who needs to prove that without ads
| people won't get what they want.
|
| > but with disruptive products
|
| Disruptive is a synonym for "unethical"
|
| > Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling.
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| > Some of those needs are caused by problems the
| individual isn't consciously aware of, but isn't aware of
| the available solutions
|
| and the solution is advertising?
|
| you're kidding, right?
|
| T: Hi J, I have a problem X, can you help me?
|
| J: Hi T, I don't know much about X, but M does. Ask him.
|
| 2 hours later
|
| T: Thanks J, M was of great help. Now I've solved my
| problem, I am happy, and my trust in you just got bigger.
|
| advertising is *lies* so people not only will try to
| fulfill a fabricated need, they will also be frustrated
| by the fact that advertisers *lied* to them.
|
| No, Nikes won't help you to "just do it"
|
| Running won't be easier, if you never did before, because
| you buy a pair of shoes that sells you the idea that
| everyone who's wearing them is an athlete, and that
| athlete could be you, just buy the shoes.
|
| How can you not see the fraud is beyond me.
|
| > Marketing that seeks to educate the individual
|
| wow.
|
| that's grotesque.
| sanedigital wrote:
| > You are the one who needs to prove that without ads
| people won't get what they want.
|
| This is the default mode for startups. It results in
| failure. "If you build it, they will come," doesn't work
| in the marketplace. Try it yourself.
|
| > Disruptive is a synonym for "unethical".
|
| Hard disagree, sorry. I don't think you're going to find
| many like-minded people on this site.
|
| > > Everybody has "needs" they're not fulfilling.
|
| > [Citation needed]
|
| I'm not even sure how you can deny this. Do you really
| think everyone out there is living their best lives? Are
| businesses out there just performing at 100% efficiency,
| with no need for any new products or services to help
| them improve? What do you think economic growth is based
| on, if not the creation of new value?
|
| > and the solution is advertising?
|
| Yes, the solution is marketing--advertising being one
| piece of that puzzle. How did 'M' in your example find
| out about the product? Are "experts" just born with
| inherent knowledge of their fields?
|
| > advertising is _lies_ so people not only will try to
| fulfill a fabricated need, they will also be frustrated
| by the fact that advertisers _lied_ to them.
|
| I advertise. Nothing I say is a lie. I advertise that I
| can help non-technical founders build their MVPs better,
| faster, and cheaper than my competitors. That's true. I
| advertise to people that _want_ to build an MVP. Their
| need exists before I advertise to them. Nobody is going
| to see an ad of mine and go "Oh man, I was going to
| spend my paycheck on food, but now that I've seen this ad
| about NoNerds.com building MVPs, I guess I'll starve and
| give them all my money instead."
|
| > How can you not see the fraud is beyond me.
|
| I'm not the one speaking in absolutes. There is bad
| advertising out there. Most brand advertising is bad. But
| ~50% of the advertising market is PERFORMANCE, not BRAND.
| How you can not see the difference between "Buy budweiser
| and get laid," and "Buy Infotex solutions and save 15% on
| monthly payroll costs." is beyond me.
|
| > that's grotesque.
|
| Agree to disagree. The economy is based on the creation
| and distribution of value. Good marketing seeks to inform
| individuals of potential sources of value to them. It
| creates efficiency in the marketplace by allowing new
| solutions to reach more potential buyers more rapidly.
|
| Does it grant airtime to "bad" solutions occasionally? Of
| course. But in your own arguments, the buyer is
| ultimately the one responsible for the purchase decision.
| And if good products are being advertised as well, the
| buyer is given an opportunity to discover alternatives to
| the solutions they're already aware of. This increased
| information allows them to make better economic
| decisions.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > > [Citation needed]
|
| > I'm not even sure how you can deny this. Do you really
| think everyone out there is living their best lives?
|
| I would say it's a bit of a stretch to assume the
| majority of "stuff" that's advertised contributes to
| someone living a better version of their life.
| brimble wrote:
| I don't get the "well _technically_ advertising _can_ be
| good " argument in its favor, yet it's the most common
| one I see on this site.
|
| If 5% is good (I'm being _very_ generous) and "seeks to
| inform individuals of potential sources of value to
| them", that's still 95% manipulative, deceptive crap.
| sanedigital wrote:
| The inconvenient truth for the anti-advertising crowd is
| that modern digital advertising is one of the most
| democratizing forces in business history. I can develop
| an offer in minutes and spend less than $20 to get
| *thousands* of eyeballs on that offer by the end of the
| day. I don't need a $100K marketing budget, I don't need
| representation on Madison Avenue, I don't need to hire a
| sales force to make cold calls. For small businesses,
| that power is revolutionary.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I think no one is arguing that it works. I think people
| are saying it's unethical and/or "95% manipulative,
| deceptive crap"
| js8 wrote:
| > This is the default mode for startups. It results in
| failure. "If you build it, they will come," doesn't work
| in the marketplace.
|
| It worked for many open source products. It worked for
| games like Minecraft and Factorio.
|
| Looks to me, if you're unique enough, they will come, but
| if you're not, tough - perhaps nobody really needs
| another crappy version of what's already out there.
| sanedigital wrote:
| > Looks to me, if you're unique enough, they will come,
| but if you're not, tough - perhaps nobody really needs
| another crappy version of what's already out there.
|
| You should try raising funds with that attitude. See what
| YC's response is during an interview when you suggest
| that your marketing plan is to be "unique enough [that]
| they will come".
| cglace wrote:
| As a business owner can I hire you to help me acquire
| customers using your method?
| cfraenkel wrote:
| If you're honestly looking for a citation, start with
| Galbraith's The Affluent Society.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society).
| This was old hat in the 50s. They just didn't realize it
| was going to burn the planet (and us with it)
| smilekzs wrote:
| > If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that
| sells them.
|
| > If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live happily,
| because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and most
| probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend is
| wearing them)
|
| This reasoning is flawed because it ignores a common
| scenario: I want _a_ pair of shoes, but none of the ones I
| find could fit me well enough. In other words, _existing_
| demand has not been met. Discovery has value.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| If that's your definition of manufactured demand then even
| making a product is manufactured demand because making the
| product means people will become aware of it therefore
| creating 'fabricated' demand by them discovering it. In
| reality a crowded/undiscovered market needs discovery
| mechanisms so in theory the right product finds the right
| person. But also in reality and the point I think you're
| trying to make is that the wrong product with the biggest
| advertising spend will find someone instead of something
| that's be a better fit.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > If that's your definition of manufactured demand then
| even making a product is manufactured demand
|
| sorry, but you are confusing making a product to solve a
| problem or fill a need with lying to get the attention of
| people to sell them something that does not solve the
| problem nor fills the need.
|
| have you ever lied to these adv platforms? I have many
| accounts were I blatantly lie about myself, like for
| example I say I am fat, I post pictures of fat people
| pretending it's me and immediately I get bombarded by ads
| for products to lose weight, training programs that
| "promise" you results in 2 weeks and dating apps.
|
| That's the sad state of affairs in 2022.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I can assure you that I'm not confusing anything just
| extrapolating your argument in that prior post. I agree
| though that advertising is a pretty lousy discovery
| mechanism a lot of the time.
| paulcole wrote:
| >If I want a pair of shoes I like, I go to the shop that
| sells them. >If I don't know those shoes exist, I will live
| happily, because I have no fabricated need to fulfill (and
| most probably if I'll know about them it's because a friend
| is wearing them)
|
| My feet hurt. The shoes at the shop only sells shoes that
| make my feet hurt. How do I discover shoes that don't make
| my feet hurt?
|
| How did your friend discover their shoes?
| znowcone wrote:
| My friend discovered them with his eyes when he went to a
| different store that sells different shoes. He picked a
| pair that was visually appealing to him, tried them on
| and they turned out to be really comfy.
|
| But I'd visit a doctor if your feet hurt no matter the
| shoe.
| brimble wrote:
| Call a shoe store and ask?
|
| Google (in a world in which it didn't have ads)?
|
| Ask a podiatrist?
| runako wrote:
| > Call a shoe store and ask?
|
| He just went into a shoe store. How would he know which
| shoe store to call? (I remember this, it was pre-Internet
| and it was awful.)
|
| > Google (in a world in which it didn't have ads)?
|
| In a world without ads, Google would be a bulletin board
| (no meaningful revenue means no petabyte-sized index).
| You can replicate this experience on Craigslist today.
| Good luck!
|
| > Ask a podiatrist?
|
| In the USA, this adds a time tax (many people need to go
| to their primary doctor first to get a referral, then
| would have to be seen by the podiatrist to get to ask the
| question) and a money tax (all those doctors have to get
| paid).
|
| Which of these is better than clicking an ad?
| brimble wrote:
| How is clicking an ad better than advice from someone who
| should know? Maybe this is just a weak example but an ad
| that's like "do shoes hurt your feet for some reason?
| Maybe it's this! Buy our shoe to fix it!" seems a hell of
| a lot less likely to be useful than finding out why your
| foot hurts and getting informed advice on what will help.
|
| Seems like you're just very lucky if the advertised
| product ends up solving the problem. I get that asking
| people or looking things up is effort but it's also a
| hell of a lot more likely to yield good results than
| trusting a stranger's ad to be accurate and helpful. The
| world would not end without advertising (or with very
| limited advertising), and people would not be unable to
| find things they want or need. They might not as often
| stumble on that information while doing something totally
| unrelated, sure, but I don't think that happens often
| enough to offset the harmful effects of advertising.
| runako wrote:
| > Maybe this is just a weak example but an ad that's like
| "do shoes hurt your feet for some reason? Maybe it's
| this! Buy our shoe to fix it!" seems a hell of a lot less
| likely to be useful than finding out why your foot hurts
| and getting informed advice on what will help.
|
| You're absolutely correct. It is also true that many
| people will not have the means (insurance, for example!)
| to do that, nor will they have the motivation to do that
| in every case (think of how few people employ personal
| financial advisors, for example).
|
| Also: an environment free of ads would almost necessarily
| eliminate (or corrupt, via paid placement) product review
| sites that seek to help people make informed decisions.
| De-monetizing impartial information sites seems like a
| bad outcome.
|
| Also: an environment free of ads would also by necessity
| eliminate
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I rarely go to Taco Bell. I would never have known about
| the Quesarito if I didn't see an ad. I was very glad I did.
| This same thing has happened many times with many food
| items.
|
| Same for seeing billboards for various places across the
| country. I love Taco John's, Taco Time, and Del Taco, and
| wouldn't have found them without advertising.
|
| The ads' "manufactured demand" improved my life in these
| instances. Same for various other products in other
| instances.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > I would never have known about the Quesarito
|
| that's brand awarness, the product is the same.
|
| When I go out eating I try different places, because some
| of them is surely better than the others.
|
| The ads for "Quesarito" it's their product, if you didn't
| like it, you would be now thinking that you were fooled
| by the ads.
|
| Exactly what taco bell did to you for all these years.
| cglace wrote:
| So, I create a web page that describes a product
| ("Quesarito"). You, the consumer, find out about the
| product by stumbling upon the page by luck; if you decide
| to try the product and don't like it does that mean you
| were fooled?
|
| Can you only be fooled when you are alerted to the
| presence of a product without your consent?
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| A couple of genuine questions for you, not to lessen the
| good fortune advertising has brought you.
|
| Did you go to eat at Taco Bell because of the ad? Would
| you have already, and perhaps seen it on their menu
| boards and tried it as a result?
|
| Were you really not aware of these other taco places, and
| only became aware of them due to billboards? I know of
| 2/3 of them, I haven't heard of Taco Time (live in the
| midwest), but I've heard of the rest from people I know.
| I don't think I've seen any of them advertised here, but
| I could be wrong.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Did you go to eat at Taco Bell because of the ad?
|
| Yes, I don't go there usually. I might have eventually
| seen it but probably missed out on various short-lived
| items.
|
| The other taco places I only get to go to on a road trip
| since I live on the east coast. I can't be sure how I
| found them at first but it was either conventional ads or
| those standardized freeway exit food signs, which
| certainly also count as an advertisement.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| The taco bell bit makes sense; promotional period items
| like that might be entirely missed by infrequent guests,
| and may be enough to drive them in.
|
| I guess I hadn't much considered the ability for
| something like a billboard to influence a traveler like
| that. A very good portion of their audience would see it
| day after day, but if you were just passing through the
| area, you wouldn't otherwise know some of the local
| options, interesting point.
| WheatM wrote:
| bbarnett wrote:
| I think, logically, if they wanted thing or service, they'd
| know they want it, yes?
|
| What you mean is, they want it after being told how this and
| that it is, how utterly special, how pathetic they are for
| not having it, how bad they look without it, and a spell of
| desire and want are cast over them, to covet thing $x.
|
| So many things, are only a thing because someone else has it.
| sanedigital wrote:
| Most successful startups provide products or services that
| address problems that lack solutions, where the solutions
| aren't sufficient, or where they cause additional problems.
| When these new, "disruptive" products emerge, the
| marketplace needs to be educated about them.
|
| This is what the term "Marketing" means: it's about
| _creating a market_ by injecting demand into the
| marketplace. If people aren 't aware that a product exists,
| they can't demand it.
|
| It's easy to focus on Budweiser ads, because those are the
| memorable ones. But only ~50% of advertising spend is brand
| advertising [1]. Most advertising isn't about making you
| feel less cool, or promising increased sex appeal. It's
| about identifying with a customer, calling out a problem
| they're having, and educating them about a solution to that
| problem.
|
| [1: I'd love better evidence for this but this was all I
| could find:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108407/share-of-
| brand-v...]
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Most advertising isn't about making you feel less cool,
| or promising increased sex appeal. It's about identifying
| with a customer, calling out a problem they're having,
| and educating them about a solution to that problem.
|
| This is quite a bad faith description of "performance
| advertising".
| theamk wrote:
| "Covet"? "pathetic"? "someone else has it"? You are taking
| this too close to heart and/or paying too much attention to
| the ads.
|
| For example, I just went to wired.com and saw:
|
| - Many ads for some sort of business-related website, looks
| like an mix of Slack and Google Calendar with some extra
| bells + whistles.
|
| - A Outbrain block with junk like "Top 25 photos of..." and
| "You would be surprised about ..."
|
| While none of those was interesting to me, none of them
| made me feel "pathetic" either.
| Rygian wrote:
| That does not justify advertisement. The problem you describe
| could as well be solved by a neutral third party actor (could
| even be a public service) providing impartial news about the
| kinds of products that exist in the market.
| toshk wrote:
| So then what, you get curators like Google who become super
| powerful? Let governments manage it?
| Rygian wrote:
| Google (an ad agency) is the exact opposite of a curator,
| so obviously no.
|
| It needs to be regulated, and probably run in a not-for-
| profit structure with fully transparent accounting and
| methodology.
| toshk wrote:
| Organic search is exactly that, a curator
| danShumway wrote:
| > So then what, you get curators like Google who become
| super powerful?
|
| Doesn't Google currently own one of the biggest
| advertising platforms on the entire planet, and don't
| they curate what categories of products are allowed to
| appear on it?
|
| There are lots of problems with curation, but I am not
| convinced centralization is one of them. At least, I'm
| not convinced that centralization is any more of an issue
| with curation than it currently is with advertising.
| There's no reason to centralize curation and give control
| to one company/government any more than there is reason
| to centralize Internet ads with one company/government.
| toshk wrote:
| Advertisement I would say on Google are more free then
| their "curated" search.
|
| When ads for instance are not allowed on Google, all
| that's left is google's opinion on whats useful. Which is
| weirdly enough most likely less free and more opiniated.
| danShumway wrote:
| I don't really understand where the difference is that
| you're seeing.
|
| Google bans categories of ads, and bans advertisers that
| it views as bad actors, the same way it does with search.
| It also uses an algorithm to figure out what ads to show
| you, the same way it does with search results. It uses a
| lot of the same data (location, history, preferences,
| etc) to make those decisions.
|
| The only difference I can see is that advertisers pay
| money to influence that algorithm (ie, a company willing
| to pay more money will win an auction against a company
| that has less money). Is that what you're referring to as
| the thing that makes it more free and less opinionated?
| tremon wrote:
| No, you get things like Consumer Reports and numerous
| other domain-specific review sites like Anandtech,
| Phoronix, Silent PC Review or Hacker News.
| [deleted]
| stickfigure wrote:
| A world without advertising is - by and large - a world of
| entrenched megacompanies that dominate their space without
| fear of usurp. It's a world where the only viable politicians
| are popular actors.
|
| Like it or not, advertising is an important way of spreading
| new memes in a liberal society based on voluntary exchange.
| Banning advertising is a recipe for stagnation.
| pksebben wrote:
| that's nonsense. memes do not rely on advertising to exist,
| and as advertising is a service (that costs money) it's the
| biggest wallets that benefit the most from it.
|
| hell, look at Facebook and Google, both advertising
| companies and I'd argue two of the biggest and most
| entrenched.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Organic meme spread is extremely random and
| unpredictable. Yes, rich people (and conglomerations of
| not-so-rich people) have better access to advertising. So
| what?
|
| Facebook and Google are just mediums, like "television"
| in the abstract. The social value of advertising comes
| from the people doing the advertising. Like everything,
| some of it's crap and some of it's great.
| brimble wrote:
| OK, but how's it _different_ from the current world?
| stickfigure wrote:
| It would be strictly worse. Advertising is at worst an
| annoyance. On the other hand, a legally-enforced
| gatekeeping bureaucracy that decides whose speech is
| allowed to reach other people is an Orwellean nightmare.
| Do you trust <insert your opposing political tribe here>
| to decide which political ads are acceptable?
|
| Despite HN's fixation on G and F, there are multitudes of
| advertising channels both online and offline.
| brimble wrote:
| My main concern's dragnet spying and user-targeted (not
| content-targeted) ads but I do think it'd be nice to get
| rid of (nearly) all ads, too--it's just that if I can
| only pick eliminate all ads or eliminate all spying, I'd
| pick the latter. I think that priority order is why
| people tend to fixate on big tech, for which the spying
| is all tied up with the advertising, but I also think
| magazines selling subscriber lists should be illegal, the
| CRAs should either be eliminated or much more tightly
| regulated, credit card companies shouldn't be able to
| sell your purchase data, et c. No companies should be
| able to do those things, it's just that Big Tech does _a
| lot_ of that (but so do financial institutions and so on,
| sure, and those shouldn 't be able to do it either).
|
| Separately, yes, it would be nice to at squeeze all
| advertising down to some very small factor in the
| economy, if not completely eliminate it (which is
| probably impractical).
|
| [EDIT] But back to the original point, your scary-no-
| advertising-world post mostly just describes the current
| state of our has-advertising world.
| fleddr wrote:
| I couldn't agree more and I too am shocked by how people
| continue to believe we live in a simplistic demand-supply
| economy.
|
| We live in a supply economy that fabricates demand by means of
| marketing. And there's an additional amplifier: social demand.
| My neighbor has it so now I want it too.
| nathias wrote:
| All demand beyond necessities (fixed demand) is manufactured.
| The problem with advertizing is that it became ubiquitous and
| lost all function (product discovery, comparison, brand
| recognition etc.), now its just self-referential self-
| replicating garbage that spreads across the Earth on all
| surface areas like a weird semantic plague.
| loceng wrote:
| Eloquently put.
|
| I can't quickly find the bookmark to the source, but someone
| had clearly framed how advertising is used towards increasing
| demand to make production highly profitable via economies of
| scales but also at the added expense of creating more of a
| monoculture, a similar problem that exists with agriculture.
|
| I'm planning soon to launch a platform to compete with
| Twitter/Facebook, and one of the foundational design principles
| will be having no ads.
|
| "Commercial forces are determining your consciousness - that's
| the sickest way to develop the human society." - Sadhguru
| pesfandiar wrote:
| > Advertising is manufactured demand. [...] This business model
| really needs to stop.
|
| While I don't agree that all forms of advertising is about
| manufacturing demand (i.e. creating desire for stuff people
| don't really need), let's assume a significant portion of it
| is. The huge problem with "stopping this business model" is
| consumer markets are huge; it's $20T in the US alone, and I
| imagine a significant part of the whole ecosystem will implode
| if people only bought things they needed with cash the actually
| have.
|
| Suggesting we move away from advertising is equivalent to going
| against the economic status quo. Not saying there's no merit to
| this (e.g. we can argue the impact on the environment), but
| it's an incredibly uphill battle.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Sometimes forests need to be cleansed with fire to stay
| healthy.
|
| I hate the idea that we need to project jobs, even if those
| jobs are significant net harms for society.
|
| Advertisers, private health insurance, political fundraising.
| I will have no sympathy for the unemployed, should they lose
| their unethical jobs.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's psychological warfare, plain and simple.
|
| Even the father of modern advertising and PR admit this in his
| own literature:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Books
|
| https://www.slideshare.net/reneehobbs/excerpts-from-bernays-...
|
| Of course his is a sort of perverted view that focuses on the
| supposed good that comes from the shaping public opinion to the
| exclusion of the form of slavery that is inherent in its
| successful application.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Media agences and creative agencies are completely different
| worlds and do not mix.
| pjerem wrote:
| Thank you.
| samwillis wrote:
| > On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and
| commodification of well told lies.
|
| > Because advertising is manufactured demand.
|
| > This business model really needs to stop.
|
| Understandable advertising is a controversial topic, and change
| needs to happen, but this is just ridiculous. True the
| "consumer culture" does need to shift for environmental
| reasons. But your argument is that effectively there should be
| "no unnesisery spend ever". So that's an end of:
|
| - coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, for pleasure.
|
| - all entertainment, no tvs, film, theatre.
|
| - all travel for pleasure, no tourism.
|
| How is buying a few unnecessary nick nacks online worse than
| the global travel industry?
|
| Obviously that's all completely mad, but so is your argument.
|
| Frankly HN is completely bizarre at times. For a community
| focussed on entrepreneurship when it comes to advertising it's
| become so incredibly negative, practically toxic.
|
| I imagine the vast majority of people on here would be out of a
| job (directly or indirectly) without advertising.
| cwkoss wrote:
| This is a weird superlative strawman. You are extrapolating
| way past the content of the comment you're replying to.
| samwillis wrote:
| Quite right, I got carried away.
|
| But my final two points stand, it frustrates me when I see
| arguments suggesting that _all_ advertising is a net
| negative to society (ethically, environmentally, socially).
| The economic growth, and increase in quality of life, we
| have seen in the last 30 years is directly related to the
| web and therefore advertising.
| delegate wrote:
| Of course. And now that we've done that, it's time to use
| all those resources and knowledge and rethink the core
| algorithms of society.
|
| That is, if we want a chance to bring back the beautiful
| world we've inherited intact from so many generations of
| ancestors. My daughter can only see half of what I saw
| when I grew up, maybe less. There is no horizon without
| smoke, mountain snow contains ash and there are few bird
| that sing in the forests because insects are nowhere to
| be found. Eyelashes or plane tickets, those things cannot
| be compared to what we're losing in the process.
|
| No amount of micro optimization is going to stop this
| train, we have to look at the algorithms.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| > On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and
| commodification of well told lies.
|
| This belief is actually compatible with my argument, thanks to
| the "on average" qualifier! I've never said that "most
| advertising as it exists today is good," rather my point is
| "advertising in a fundamental sense doesn't have to be bad." I
| think there is a real need that can be served by advertising,
| and thus we should find good ways of serving that need which
| don't involve "manipulation, brainwashing and commodification
| of well told lies."
| secondcoming wrote:
| I can't recall the last time I bought something I didn't want.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| But certainly you want advertising for things you consider good
| and important, like maybe climate protection things, or mask
| wearing and vaccinations, and so on.
|
| For example a company could offer a more efficient heating
| appliance for homes. Then it would be a good thing if they
| advertised it, so that home builders could become aware of it.
| amelius wrote:
| Advertising is not the only way people can become aware of
| products ...
| alecbz wrote:
| I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all the
| time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can claim
| that advertising makes you want things in a way that's _wrong_
| , as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you
| normally want things?
|
| Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense
| that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all
| have that would exist completely independently of any kind of
| outside influence, and that advertising is bad because it
| tricks us into addressing other manufactured desires instead of
| our real, true desires. And that there's something wrong with
| addressing a manufactured desire instead of a "true" desire?
| Like, when you address a manufactured desire you don't actually
| feel the joy/fulfillment you would from fulfilling a "true"
| desire?
|
| I don't think that's right. I don't think we really have true,
| "pure" desires. Almost all of our desires are a result of
| social influence in one way or another. And even to the extent
| that some desires are less a product of influence than others,
| I'm not sure satisfying those desires is necessarily better.
| I've bought things after I saw an ad about them, and they're
| things I now genuinely enjoy. Why does it matter if that
| enjoyment is a result of the ad or would have existed either
| way?
|
| Maybe a much shorter way of saying this:
|
| > In other words, you can make people consume considerably more
| stuff they don't want by constantly nagging them with ads.
|
| Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to genuinely
| changing what they want?
|
| I share the gut sentiment that it feels wrong to be manipulated
| by ads, but I feel like there needs to be more to this
| argument. Though I think you can still think advertising is bad
| in an "arms race" kind of way (if everyone stopped doing it at
| once we'd possibly not really be any worse off and have all
| that time/money to spend elsewhere).
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't know about other people, but I don't buy things I
| don't want.
|
| P.S. I guess I am a unique snowflake!
|
| P.P.S. Maybe it's because I'm a tightwad. I do not enjoy
| spending money. So I have to really want something to part
| with cash for it.
| leetcrew wrote:
| some kinds of ads are pretty bad, and some are fine.
|
| consider the standard alcohol ad showing a bunch of cool
| people drinking the product and having a great time. this
| does nothing to educate the consumer about the product and
| serves only to inspire FOMO. the implication is that you too
| could be cool if you drink bud light.
|
| on the other hand, some ads do just sell the objective
| qualities of the product. one of the all time most successful
| ad campaigns at a previous employer was a factual comparison
| of features and prices between their product and that of a
| much larger competitor. it worked because it really was a
| better deal; people just hadn't heard of it yet.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| One useful framing is to ask not about the mechanics at the
| individual level,
|
| but at the level of society (and by extension, sustainable
| civilization).
|
| There is strong signal everywhere that strong signals deeply
| shape not just individual behavior but individual
| understanding of it. This is in significant part what we mean
| when we examine "cultural difference" which many of us here
| know is very real and sometimes seems unbridgeably deep.
|
| A question to ask then, aligned with the concern, is, "what
| do we want our society to be like?" I.e. what culture do we
| wish to live in and inculcate in ourselves?
|
| This converts readily in to the question facing societies
| since before Aristotle, and this is why he was interested in
| the related question, "what is 'the good'?"
|
| This problem-the problem of our consumpation-based, demand-
| manufacturing, resource-consuming culture-has been explicitly
| analyzed and critiqued for several generations now; and there
| are reasonably contemporary, reasonably sound models of how
| we might change course without e.g. wholesale Marxist
| revolution.
|
| Of these I have always been fond of Paul Goodman's
| communitarianism, which is recent enough to address the real
| systemic pathologies of contemporary America, albeit of
| decades ago; but is in need of a total reboot wrt its
| reliance on hard data, and the language formal and "on brand"
| for the mechanisms it proposes for us to pivot.
|
| TL;DR: communitarianism proposes humans find deepest
| satisfaction and contentment in contributing to a community
| in a tangible way, to the betterment of their fellows as well
| as themselves; isolation, cynicism, tribalism, and alienation
| are hence considered primary targets; the premise is that
| addressing these requires systemic (legal, political,
| economic, and infrastructural) change, not the "personal
| responsibility" which however drives that change.
| dTal wrote:
| The GP's premise was that wanting things is bad because the
| "thing" in question is generally "nature converted into
| object we temporarily use and discard", leading to
| environmental devastation. It's not the same as "wanting",
| say, to spend time with friends and family.
|
| I would additionally add that "wanting" is not good, in
| general. It's unavoidable, sure, in the same way that pain
| is. But to take someone from a state where they do not want
| anything, and convert them to a state where they do want
| something, is to lower their happiness. Unnecessarily
| inducing a state of dissatisfaction in someone should be
| categorized similarly to causing them pain. You have lowered
| their well-being.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I don't see my "true" desires as some platonic ideal, but I
| prefer to thinkmit it like the fast and slow thinking idea -
| what I would like my desires to be and what I can be
| manipulated into in the moment.
|
| I would like to plan my purchases (and time allocation) ahead
| for a week, it would involve more fruit and vegetables, more
| time in the gym and less buying snacks on the go.
|
| Advertising tries to divert me from those "planned" goals.
| Yes that's what advertising is for - and as such it is
| antognistic to my "true" desires. Of course my true desires
| will chnage over time but the adverts for pension planning
| and kids ISAs line up with my "true" desires. Even if I don't
| particularly care which provider I use
| glenstein wrote:
| >philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that
| advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong
|
| Absolutely! We can say that, whatever the origins of our
| desires, advertising arises from the needs of _advertisers_
| and seeks to repurpose our attention and desires to align
| with those needs rather than our own.
|
| I understand where you are coming from, as it sounds like you
| don't agree with this argument so much as you think it
| demands a robust answer. I think the key to having robust
| answer is in challenging the second piece of your comment: it
| construes human interests as basically interchangeable, with
| none being really any more better than any other. I do agree
| that you would have to believe _something_ like that to
| defend advertising as fundamentally benign, and I also happen
| to think that 's absurd.
|
| Positive psychology, for all its flaws, is a systematic way
| of looking at human needs, desires, and fulfillment. And we
| really do need certain things: safety, security, to be
| understood, a certain degree of social cohesion, self
| actualization. To say that advertising is every bit as
| legitimate as any other human interests, you have to be
| willing to argue that whatever ads you see driving down a
| highway do more to reflect human nature than something like
| Maslow's hierarchy, and I think that's a really tough
| argument to make.
|
| I also think it's a fundamental confusion baked into moral
| relativism as a philosophical view itself, which (correctly!)
| captures important aspects of decision making, psychology and
| subjectivity that are at play in how people engage with our
| own desires but mistakes them for a foundation to morality
| itself.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Philosophically, that's still not convincing.
|
| Lets take the most basic form of advertising as an example.
| If I put a couch in my yard with a price tag on it, I'm
| wanting people to notice and desire to buy it, but there's
| no malicious intent. I have a thing I want to get rid of,
| maybe someone wants to buy it. If I don't do that, no one
| will know it's for sale.
|
| So I do think advertising is fundamentally benign, and
| despite what the original comment said, is absolutely part
| of supply and demand. People are supposed to generate
| supply and then sit around waiting for people to come see
| it?
|
| Of course there's lots of bad stuff going on in
| advertising. Lies, inducing FOMO, unnecessary gathering of
| personal data, etc. But I'm not convinced that advertising
| is morally wrong in it's purest form.
| ballenf wrote:
| The anti-advertising stance taken to reasonable
| conclusion is indeed absurd. You couldn't even mention
| your sofa to a friend without risk of "inciting"
| unnatural demand in them for a sofa.
|
| And you couldn't even allow third party mentions either
| as are fundamentally indistinguishable in terms of
| effects on artificial demands.
|
| But hope isn't lost. A natural limit on advertising is
| completely eliminating surveillance capitalism. Even the
| kind enable by credit cards selling your purchase
| history. Or stores issuing loyalty cards.
| dota_fanatic wrote:
| I like to look at this through the lens of push vs pull.
|
| I don't want people pushing things at me that I'm 100%
| uninterested in in the off chance that 1% of those ads is
| actually interesting to me and I otherwise wouldn't know
| it exists. I do want to be able to search a database of
| vendors (with degrees of trust associated with them) with
| objective descriptions of available goods and services at
| known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking
| for something that's completely new, I should still be
| able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings
| (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance,
| labor chain, etc.)
|
| So, no, I do think someone using their front yard to sell
| a couch is bad provided we have the internet and a good
| marketplace built on top of it. Who wants to see human
| junk covering nature solely so it can impinge on others'
| field-of-view in order to be sold? I don't think it's bad
| for them to register the availability of said couch in
| the hypothetical regulated marketplace.
|
| And, for those who consent, they can ask to have relevant
| categories of ads pushed at them. But leave people like
| me out of it. No such consent can be obtained when you
| just e.g. put it on a billboard.
|
| Yes, I know what I'm saying is probably naive and would
| never work, or something, or that's where governance is
| supposed to come in, but it's a nice dream.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I do want to be able to search a database of vendors
| (with degrees of trust associated with them) with
| objective descriptions of available goods and services at
| known costs, either one-time or recurring. If I'm looking
| for something that's completely new, I should still be
| able to find it by using relevant terms and weightings
| (cost, materials, origin of materials, shipping distance,
| labor chain, etc.)
|
| Exactly this. It's not necessarily wrong that advertising
| is justified on the grounds that it serves the interests
| of advertisers. But the attempt to justify it as
| beneficial to the consumer, well, every case where
| advertising is serving such a pro-consumer purpose is a
| case where a general purpose information directory would
| serve that same purpose better.
| glenstein wrote:
| It's not convincing if you look at it through the lense
| of a one-off cartesian hypothetical. But that is not a
| systematic understanding of what advertising is that
| makes clear the underlying interests and incentives that
| drive the process.
|
| It's a process that by its nature perpetually
| transforming in the never ending race to compete for your
| attention, and the "bad stuff" is a reflection of the
| interests and incentives essential to the nature of what
| advertising is.
| dTal wrote:
| Can we perhaps draw a distinction between "selling" and
| "advertising"?
|
| "Selling" is simply informing people of the availability
| of one half of an economic exchange. Putting a notice up
| that says "Sofa, $50 ONO" is no different than putting a
| notice up saying "will pay 50$ for sofa".
|
| "Advertising", on the other hand, attempts to _persuade_.
| It endeavours to use psychology to create a transaction
| when one would otherwise not have taken place. It 's a
| sign that says "Sofa, $50. Incredible value!!". This is
| not ethical because if we assume that the market would
| have converged on the correct price in the absence of
| advertising, then advertising distorts the market and
| makes it less efficient.
|
| Note that unadorned "buying" and "selling" are mirror
| counterparts, but there's no buyer's counterpart to
| "advertising". This is because the value of money is well
| known and non-negotiable, while the value of the good or
| service is subject to influence. This is an inherent bias
| that always works in favor of the selling party.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Advertising is informing people that you've got a
| solution to their needs. The most effective salesmen are
| people who figure out what the customer needs and
| provides it to them.
| psd1 wrote:
| > The most effective salesmen
|
| Can you cite that? I would like to test it against lies,
| manipulation and coercion.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Have you given repeat business to salesmen who lied to
| you? Do you recommend them to your family & friends?
| speed_spread wrote:
| The reciprocal to advertising is education. Not like
| professional training, but general citizenry that
| develops self-awareness and critical thinking skills.
| polyomino wrote:
| >if we assume that the market would have converged on the
| correct price in the absence of advertising
|
| >the value of money is well known and non-negotiable
|
| I wouldn't start with these assumptions since prices
| fluctuate on their own for somewhat unpredictable
| reasons. Just because advertising is immoral in some
| ideal world, doesn't mean it's immoral in a real one.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I don't think this argument works. The acceptable price
| for a good is not actually clear cut. "True" market value
| is an equilibrium price between supply and demand. Both
| the supply and the demand will fluctuate and change over
| time, with many underlying factors influencing the
| aggregate number. The acceptable price is also different
| for different buyers, and in different regions.
| Advertising is just one of the factors that may affect
| demand alongside many others.
|
| Additionally, you can argue there are many buyer's
| counterparts to advertising. At its most simple, the
| buyer has many tools to find items they want, i.e. search
| engines, etc. Additionally the buyer in many cases can
| inform the seller of an offer (generally below their
| desired pricing) and the seller can choose to accept or
| not. In some marketplaces, the buyer can effectively put
| out a request-to-buy, e.g. an open offer that many
| potential sellers can see and one may choose to fulfill.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The buyer often may not know a product even exists that
| would fill his need.
|
| For example, my car's cooling system was leaking. I had a
| devil of a time trying to figure out where it was
| leaking.
|
| It turns out there's a perfect product for it - a device
| that pumps air into the radiator. You spray some soapy
| water around, and where it bubbles is where the leak is.
|
| So in 5 minutes I could have found the leak, rather than
| wasting a great deal of time because I did not know such
| a tool existed.
| nkrisc wrote:
| That's not a point in favor of advertising, it's a point
| for the lack of general education around maintenance or
| mechanical devices among the population. Using
| pressurized air and soapy water to find leaks in things
| is a well known technique among those who regularly have
| to find leaks in things.
|
| I'm sure there was a point in the past where something
| like this would have been taught in school in a classroom
| that had all kinds of tools and machinery in it.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I think that's hanging onto the example the OP gave a
| little too closely.
|
| I found out about the company I've bought several sets of
| sheets from because they were a podcast sponsor, I
| happened to need sheets, and I liked their designs more
| than other ones I was seeing at comparable prices. If I
| hadn't heard that ad, would I have still found sheets I
| liked? Maybe! But is that really a convincing moral
| argument against those ads?
| nkrisc wrote:
| That's the thing, there's no line between what's an ad
| and what's just informational. Somewhere between "Joe's
| Sheet Emporium down on Main sells Egyptian cotton sheets"
| and psychologist-engineered gambling ads there'sa
| boundary that's crossed, but I don't know how you can
| quantify that, but I know the latter end of the spectrum
| is wrong. Unfortunately it's kind of a matter of "I'll
| know it when I see it".
| WalterBright wrote:
| I took auto shop in high school.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, there is a wide area here. For example there is
| abusive vs non-abusive advertising.
|
| Selling = Sofa is $999 and that is a good price for a
| good couch.
|
| Abusive advertising = This sofa is so wonderful that hot
| women are going to seek you out to have sex with you.
|
| When advertizging starts selling lifestyles is where it
| becomes abuse.
| vlunkr wrote:
| This is relying on the assumption that it's unethical to
| distort the market, which I don't think is a given.
| Unless you're an anarco-capitalist, and I'm pretty sure
| they're cool with advertising.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making the
| fulfillment problem worse?
|
| This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't
| influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive
| thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on our
| own jolly way.
|
| There could be an argument made that we face challenges for
| fulfillment from the inside out. Therefore objecting to one
| external force misses the forest for one tree.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Are you saying advertiser's influence is somehow making
| the fulfillment problem worse?
|
| Yes.
|
| >This kinda assumes our own thoughts and desires aren't
| influenced by outside factors (bad habits, intrusive
| thoughts, etc), and without advertisers input we are on
| our own jolly way.
|
| It doesn't assume that. It just assumes we're influenced
| by everything else other than advertising.
|
| >and without advertisers input we are on our own jolly
| way.
|
| _This_ however assumes that advertisers are beneficial
| correctives rather than accelerants of adverse behaviors.
|
| Rather than building an encyclopedia where every positive
| and negative case is examined, I'm suggesting that you
| zoom out and think about the underlying incentives in a
| systematic way. Advertising is in the interest of the
| advertisers, not the consumers. You don't have to assume
| that consumers never make mistakes in seeking their own
| fulfillment.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Everything we do involves being influenced by the
| interests of others. I'm curious what makes advertising
| A) special B) necessarily negative.
|
| Advertising is bad therefore it's bad doesn't really
| prove anything. Is that what you are saying? A good
| business will provide for at least some interests of its
| customers, so it's not clear to me that advertising is
| negative.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Yeah, but in practice... the iPhone/Apple represents an
| example par excellence: Planned obsolescence, dated
| features, software deprecation, false narrative (e.g.
| privacy). The plan is to always provide that fulfillment
| until it is time for you to renew your subscription. Then
| the fulfillment reward is attached to a new product and
| the consumer must acquiesce. Consumerism is this forest.
| Stepping any deeper into the waters, keep this outdoorsy
| pun rolling, is an arbitrary excersize. "What does it
| mean to 'be'?" Abstraction does not undo the real harm
| caused by corporations.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't have one, but don't iPhones typically work longer
| than many Android phones?
|
| I do have an iMac that's at least a decade old. I should
| install Linux since the OS isn't supported anymore, but
| it seems like it's had a good run.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > don't iPhones typically work longer than many Android
| phones
|
| Given that Google only updates Android for half as many
| years on a Pixel phone, there is planned obsolescence in
| play here, but not from Apple.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| No. Try a lightweight distro & just install Kodi or Plex
| for a media server. I have several old laptops (hp 17yrs,
| Toshiba 8yrs, Acer 11yrs) for that purpose
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > iPhone/Apple represents an example par excellence:
| Planned obsolescence, dated features, software
| deprecation, false narrative
|
| I feel like people say this and then don't provide any
| decent examples. iPhones hold value and are usable much
| longer than most Androids thanks to Apple's willingness
| to support the devices.
|
| HN loves to hate on Apple but I don't find these examples
| and arguments very compelling.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Yeah, you have missed the entire point and evidently
| context. You have been sold a narrative, which you choose
| to believe. There is evidence, some of which I have
| referenced, that you ignore. Nothing will be compelling
| for you because you have attached worth to the brand and
| by extension of possession, inhabit that worth. This was
| the intent of the brand marketing. We are taking about
| marketing
| rglullis wrote:
| > iPhones hold value.
|
| Really? How much? If you use your iPhone for two years,
| what would be the TCO?
|
| > are usable much longer
|
| Fairphone is supporting their devices for 5 years at a
| minimum. They promised 7 years for their latest model.
| And the Fairphone (who has the burden of promoting
| ethical manuafacturing, using only fair-sourced materials
| and fair pay to all their workers) still comes at less
| than half the price of the iPhone.
|
| Or say that you don't care about ethics and you just want
| your devices to be as cheap as possible. You can buy
| "budget premium" Androids (Moto Gs, Nokia 6/7) that are
| very serviceable for less than EUR200. The Nokia I bought
| in end-2018 would still be in use today if I hadn't gone
| to /e/OS, so EUR180 bought 4 years of "phone".
| Economically speaking, there is no way that an Apple
| device can beat that.
| rglullis wrote:
| The mere fact that you believe that Android is the only
| alternative to an iPhone shows how effective the
| manipulation is.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That's because for all practical purposes, it is. Name
| one bank or payment system in the developed world that
| released a native mobile app for KaiOS.
| rglullis wrote:
| First, name one bank that is not willing to provide you
| service if you don't have a smartphone. Even if you do
| find it, ask yourself if this is the type of bank that
| you really want to work with.
|
| Second, how was it that banks managed to operate for
| centuries and now there is the idea that people simply
| can not live without a mobile banking app?
|
| Third, minority rule[0]: the best way to make sure that
| we can see apps being develop for other platforms (not
| just KaiOS, but Linux devices and even ungoogled AOSP-
| based systems) is for us to cultivate the intolerant
| minorities who simply will refuse to run iOS/Android.
|
| Convenience is nice, but freedom is much better.
|
| [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-
| the-dict...
| alecbz wrote:
| > whatever the origins of our desires, advertising arises
| from the needs of advertisers and seeks to repurpose our
| attention and desires to align with those needs rather than
| our own.
|
| It sounds like you're saying something like: "advertisers
| have their own desires that are different than ours, and so
| it's more likely that they'll get us to desire things that
| are bad for us"
|
| This I think is a fair point. It's not especially unique to
| advertising as opposed to other forms of influence, though
| maybe it's most pronounced in advertising. Nonetheless,
| even if it applies to all forms of influence, it's a fair
| argument for why influence is categorically at least risky
| of being bad for us.
|
| I think you're right of course that primal needs like
| Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we
| create with advertising or other kinds of social influence.
| But I don't think that's what we're really talking about. I
| think it's more stuff like "I would have wanted to cook
| tonight but instead I saw a Dominos ad and so now I'm
| eating Dominos. This is a false desire!" Why? What makes
| the desire false just because it was created by an ad? You
| could have a genuine desire for Domino's created by the ad
| that you've now satisfied and feel good about.
|
| To the extent that ads distract us from pursuing more basic
| human needs and cause us to be more consumerist, fair. I
| think that's a broader, different point about the nature of
| consumption period.
|
| ---
|
| I don't think I'm making an argument for moral relativism
| here at all? I don't think I'd consider myself a moral
| relativist.
| glenstein wrote:
| >It sounds like you're saying something like:
| "advertisers have their own desires that are different
| than ours, and so it's more likely that they'll get us to
| desire things that are bad for us"
|
| It is a rare but very satisfying experience to see
| yourself quoted and feel like you're being interpreted
| correctly. Yes, you are right, I'm saying that, more or
| less.
|
| >I think you're right of course that primal needs like
| Maslow's cannot really compare to needs or desires we
| create with advertising [...] But I don't think that's
| what we're really talking about.
|
| I take something like Maslow to be comprehensive, and so
| always implicated. I think your dominos example serves to
| suggest that there are cases that are mundane, harmless,
| or where nothing is at stake.
|
| I think so far as something like that is concerned, I
| think that's true and those things happen. However, I
| think (1) even seemingly benign examples really do have
| important issues at stake. I think American consumers
| have trouble budgeting and a huge input into that is
| innocent-seeming habit of ordering out, which, over time,
| ads up in significant ways. Also (2) while we can
| contemplate one-off examples, I think the primary frame
| of reference should be a big picture, systematic look at
| the incentives. The system writ large serves interests of
| advertisers, not consumers, and the legitimacy of that
| lives or dies with systematic arguments about the
| incentives.
|
| >I don't think I'm making an argument for moral
| relativism here at all?
|
| I think the idea that our preferences are transient, that
| none are really more right than any other, and that
| therefore there's nothing really at stake in letting your
| interests be swapped out for different interests, is what
| I regard as moral relativism. You have to believe there's
| some underlying truth at stake and real interests being
| defended to make a case against ads.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Are you pretty or ugly? Are you smart or stupid? Are you
| successful or failing? Do you have high status or low status?
|
| Causing someone to internalize the later rather than the
| former could certainly lead them to enjoy a product while I
| have simultaneously 'manufactured' a 'need' where there
| was/is none.
| the8472 wrote:
| Is wireheading happiness?
| vannevar wrote:
| >Like implicit in this line of reasoning is a bit of a sense
| that like, there's a "true", base set of desires that we all
| have that would exist completely independently of any kind of
| outside influence...
|
| This is a good point, because I think it surfaces the real
| problem with modern advertising, versus the kind of
| persuasive speech that has existed since the beginning of
| time. And that problem is scale: modern advertising is mass-
| produced on a scale unimagined when the first merchants cried
| out their advertising in open-air markets. The power to reach
| millions of people means that capital can be used to
| manufacture demand on an industrial scale, to the point where
| the underlying product or service is almost immaterial (see
| the bottled water industry for an extreme example). Since
| advertising drives sales, which generates even more capital,
| the modern media landscape creates a massive rich-get-richer
| marketing feedback loop. As capital competes more keenly for
| scarcer and scarcer consumer attention, more and more
| advertising is injected into the media stream. And by doing
| so, the winners accumulate more capital to push more
| advertising. It's a race to the bottom, and I don't believe
| this particular bottom is a very good place for society. Can
| I prove that society would be better off without advertising
| entirely? No, but I can make a pretty good case based on
| history that extreme wealth inequality is bad for society,
| and modern mass advertising contributes to rising inequality.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that
| advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong, as
| opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you
| normally want things?
|
| Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette
| advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood
| movie studios to include their brands in films. That's
| engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in untold
| millions of people suffering and dying.
|
| But this is less of what bothers me about ads, because I do
| agree that desires are largely from social influence anyways.
| If you don't have the right skillfulness you're still subject
| to being influenced and lost in what Buddhism calls Tanha.
|
| My main objection is advertising steals my attention without
| my consent and actively works against me in order to try and
| get me to pay attention to something that isn't what I'm
| trying to pay attention to. Say what you will about Banksy,
| but I'm always reminded of something he (they?) said about
| ads which resonates with me:
|
| "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt
| into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear.
| They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
| They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not
| sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
| They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They
| have access to the most sophisticated technology the world
| has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The
| Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are
| forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property
| rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they
| like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any
| advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you
| see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and
| re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for
| permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw
| at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than
| nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe
| you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in
| front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't
| even start asking for theirs."
| bennysomething wrote:
| Banksy sure has thin skin.
|
| This is just another version of people thinking that
| because something is offensive it should be banned.
|
| Practically speaking what would banning advertising look
| like? Who gets to decide what is a "worthwhile" product.
| Sure banning smoking adverts most people agree on as it
| gives you cancer, maybe alcohol too. But saying if I invent
| something I'm not allowed to advertise anywhere because
| someone has decided they want the world to look at certain
| way, no thanks.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| At least in one iteration it'd maybe look like what Sao
| Paulo did [1], which to my eyes looks quite a lot better
| than the before pictures. No one is saying what is or
| isn't a worthwhile product, just don't advertise.
|
| [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-
| law-secret...
| bennysomething wrote:
| Someone one hacker news pointed this out to me before.
| I'm not convinced. Poor planning law allowed bill boards
| to be thrown up every where, I've no problem with
| advertising in my own country (UK), as it requires
| planning permission.
|
| Also would Time Square be better with no advertising?
| Another extreme example for comparison.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| I was in Times Square last night and yeah, for sure, it
| would be way better without advertising.
|
| But we definitely should keep the guy that was wearing a
| mask that looked like it was from the Lion King musical,
| shirtless, ripped, doing bicep curls with resistance
| bands, blasting DMX at midnight. I'm here for that.
| greggman3 wrote:
| is this a generational thing?
|
| In th 80s and early 90s I subscribed to several computer
| magazines "Creative Computing", "Byte", "Compute", "Wired"
| and a few others. I also subscribed to gaming magazines
| like "Computer Gaming World", "Electronic Gaming Monthly",
| "Joystik", "Edge", "Game Developer Magazine". I and
| everyone else bought them in part for the ads. It was how
| we found out what new games and products where available.
|
| I don't like ads spying on me and I don't like intrusive
| ads but ad in general are not evil to me.
|
| Another example, I actually enjoy reading ads in public
| transportation. I'd find out about museums, festivals, and
| even various interesting services and products I didn't
| know about.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Now you can find out what's available from the internet,
| on demand, when it suits you and not when it suits the
| advertisers.
|
| There is so much choice now that you suffer from analysis
| paralysis unless you get recommendations on what to get,
| or know how to curate and ruthlessly filter down the
| firehose of choices down to a manageable trickle. Of
| course you don't need ads adding their 2C/ to that
| stream.
| mtsr wrote:
| The advertising in the 80's and 90's often also served as
| a kind of catalogue because there was no other way to
| find things except word of mouth. That's a solved problem
| with the modern internet, if you want to find a type of
| game, find a good community or similar to the magazines
| of before, follow a YouTuber or Twitter or whatever you
| like.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Yes, but not necessarily. I have ads turned on for The
| Register because they cater to a specific market segment,
| and also because I like to support the site.
|
| The ads are pretty tightly focused on new technology
| companies, which I'm interested in. BizCoFoo with a new
| DB technology that turns stored procedures into pimento
| cheese sandwiches is not going to find a lot of traction
| on r/SQL except to generate a lot of noise from people
| who hate pimento cheese.
|
| Ads aren't an "all this" or "all that" sort of thing. I'm
| not a fan of billboards, because I think they're ugly and
| hateful, but when I'm travelling in a place I'm not
| familiar with, it's handy to know that there's a BBQ
| joint in 17 miles, which may not be featured on Yelp or
| Foursquare or whatever.
|
| Ads can be great if they directly inform you of something
| you want, need, or are interested in. The ad-tech
| companies, though, are terrible at doing this
| algorithmically; e.g., seeing ads for dishwashers
| everywhere right after you've bought a dishwasher.
| They're also terrible because the first instinct, when a
| Web site's ad revenue starts to falter, is to add even
| more ads from other networks to pump it back up.
|
| One or two ads on a Web page is tolerable. Ads that show
| up every time you hit Page Down? Cancer.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| To this point, that's actually what I use Instagram for
| now. I'm almost more interested in the ads on there than
| the content of the people I follow. I've found clothes
| brands that I'm interested in, new shoes that fit my
| vibe, and lots of concerts that I'm interested in. I
| think the biggest gain for a lot of them is brand
| awareness. I haven't actually bought much because I don't
| need new clothes at the moment, but come spring when I'm
| looking for a new outfit or two, I'm definitely coming
| back to a couple of those sites.
| alecbz wrote:
| > Sure, just look at all the decades of cigarette
| advertisements and the tobacco companies paying Hollywood
| movie studios to include their brands in films. That's
| engaging in subtle mass manipulation that resulted in
| untold millions of people suffering and dying.
|
| As you more or less say in the next paragraph, you're
| answering a different question I think. Can advertising
| make you want things that are bad for you? Absolutely. But
| so can lots of things. I'm asking if the way a desire comes
| to be makes the desire good or bad, independently of
| whether the desire itself is good for you.
| hn-new wrote:
| > I'm asking if the way a desire comes to be makes the
| desire good or bad, independently of whether the desire
| itself is good for you.
|
| Yes, I think. For example, if I develop a desire because
| someone lies to me or manipulates me, then the formation
| of the desire itself is bad (and potentially corrupting
| since believing lies or being subject to manipulation can
| lead to further cognitive problems).
|
| As you say desires can push you towards both good and bad
| things. But we value not only those good or bad things,
| we also value autonomy and good habits of mind. So in
| various ways, ill-formed desires can be bad for us.
|
| If you're interested in this sort of thing, you might
| find _Vices of the Mind_ by Quassim Cassam interesting.
| It 's more about belief than desire, but I think that the
| issues are closely related.
|
| https://newbooksnetwork.com/quassim-cassam-vices-of-the-
| mind...
| cy_hauser wrote:
| For the sake of argument I'll say the way a desire comes
| into being has no bearing on making it good or bad. What
| is the implication of this with respect to advertising in
| your mental model?
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Through the various replies here, there's more than
| enough evidence of harm. It seems you are, at this point,
| merely defending your prior statement and not addressing
| the issue in any way. We can attempt to nullify all
| harmful things by redirecting them with some
| philosophical meta-analysis, e.g.: harm is good because
| it leads to growth/development/character. Ultimately,
| that's an easy way to abstract your way out of
| recognizing facts. The powerful tools available to
| advertisers and the persistence of those tools across
| devices & platforms is beyond _most_ minds to resist. If
| you want to be philosophical, a better position would be
| to view such as enslavement because that is the logical
| endpoint.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pointing out the thing that I find the most
| objectionable about advertising which is that it's main
| function is to steal my attention.
|
| I don't think there is such a thing as a good desire or a
| bad desire, they are just desire and all desires are
| something to work on bringing awareness to so they don't
| rule you.
| Retric wrote:
| Advertising a product that does X/Y/Z but also causes
| cancer without mentioning the cancer means people want a
| different product that isn't being sold.
|
| Currently (edit:some) prescription drugs are being
| advertised with mentions of side effects like death, but
| what's being treated isn't mentioned. That's clearly not
| advertising the actual product being sold either, yet
| it's also effective.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
|
| Are pills being sold by pretty ads that are required to
| tell people about risks AND required not to tell about
| what the pill is for?
|
| AND those ads WORK?
|
| Wow
| Retric wrote:
| They are allowed to tell you want the pill is for, but I
| have seen a few commercials where I had no idea what the
| pill was trying to treat.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think that might be (even) more interesting as a
| behavioural psychology question than philosophical. It's..
| probably been studied? Seems like it would be interesting
| even to advertisers themselves, since it tells you who is
| worth advertising to.
| bnralt wrote:
| One big source of evidence is that people go out of their way
| to avoid ads. Companies know this, and often give users an
| option to pay extra for ad-free versions of their products. I
| can think of many premium products that where being ad free
| is a selling point; I can think of _any_ premium product
| where additional advertisements were a selling point, and the
| idea is probably laughable to people.
|
| I've never seen anyone say their quality of life is worse
| with fewer advertisements; it's almost always the opposite is
| true.
|
| All behavior evidence points to people viewing advertisements
| as something detrimental, and this detrimental behavior
| consumes an enormous amount of our society's resources. I
| can't see how we can view advertising in any way but as a net
| negative for society.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Evidence for your position: people pay for newspapers and
| magazines, and pay more for newspapers and magazines
| without advertising; indeed, the newspapers and magazines
| with less or no advertising charge less.
|
| Also evidence for your position: the Computer Shopper (US,
| not UK) eventually bulked up to 1000 pages per month,
| almost all of which were advertisements by computer
| companies -- PC builders, parts suppliers, manufacturers,
| and so forth. But what it did was act as a catalog for all
| those companies, because you couldn't find them on the web
| back then. You can track the page count decline against the
| advent of ubiquitous Internet.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > One big source of evidence is that people go out of their
| way to avoid ads.
|
| Not really, or actually people hate excessive in-your-face
| advertising which unfortunately is the dominant form now
| online, but at the same time the loss in paper-based and
| other "traditional" advertising has plateaued, even during
| these times. In other words, there's indeed a tolerance
| point for most people for advertising, the online ad market
| however definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The tolerance point is near 0. Every time I install a
| pihole and uBlock for one of my relatives I always get a
| "Wow, that's way better!" response.
|
| People tolerate it until they know they have an option.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I'm talking about advertising in general, you
| specifically focused on online advertising - which I
| agree that it's so blatant and obnoxious.
|
| > In other words, there's indeed a tolerance point for
| most people for advertising, the online ad market however
| definitely crossed the line for a lot of people.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I would further hypothesize that the number is broadly
| near 0 for any broadcast, propaganda-based advertising -
| TV, billboards, etc. I just don't have the ability to
| block those.
|
| The kind of advertising people will readily tolerate is
| the kind you expose yourself to. E.g. Seeing a sign in a
| store window or a flyer for a show on a community
| bulletin board and going to look at it.
| bnralt wrote:
| It's not just online. For instance, Hulu's ad-free
| subscription cost is almost twice that of it's regular
| cost. This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song
| advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list
| no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the
| service[1]. If you go to the SiriusXM radio site right
| now, you'll see that they advertise it being ad-free.
|
| When people are paying extra to avoid something, it's a
| clear sign that they see it as detrimental.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDUttzlKLU
| zinekeller wrote:
| > This isn't a new phenomenon either; here's a song
| advertising a paid TV service from the 1960's that list
| no advertisements as one of the reasons to pay for the
| service.
|
| And how many have _actually_ bothered to? The problem is
| that you 're treating it as a black-and-white thing which
| is not true at all. It is true that there's a percentage
| of people who _do_ prefer advertising, 17% in current
| online advertising (which shows that majority hate online
| advertising) and 54% in traditional advertising (both are
| for the US only, data tend to fluctuate but in general
| this holds nearly everywhere but Asia where they tend to
| view advertising as more favourable).
|
| There is, of course, a balance where the majority of
| people will be fine. For example, European television and
| radio stations do have limits on advertising: it
| definitely helped a lot that it allowed them to know what
| new services and products are available. Coincidently,
| they have strong consumer protection - lies in
| advertising are actively patrolled and most people do get
| angry when the advertisement is misleading.
| Unfortunately, the US - which tends to have low-quality,
| clickbaity commercials - never saw a better alternative,
| and concluded that _all_ advertising is bad. I 'm not
| surprised that there's a backlash against advertising -
| they indeed lost the trust in people. Unfortunately, the
| American model served as the global model online, so here
| we are.
| bnralt wrote:
| We have premium subscriptions that show that people value
| no advertising. I haven't ever seen any premium
| subscription that shows anyone values advertising. Have
| you ever seen any subscription that says the user will
| get more advertisements if they pay more? I think most
| people would view the concept as ridiculous.
|
| Hulu could have two premium options, one where you pay
| more for no advertising, and another where you pay more
| for extra ads. If what you are saying is true, every
| company is leaving money on the table by ignoring this
| demographic. I think it's more likely that this
| demographic doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > I haven't ever seen any premium subscription that shows
| anyone values advertising.
|
| So you haven't touched industrial magazines. Explains
| everything.
|
| Pre-internet, the way that you can actually get
| information in a field is to have a publisher collect
| advertisements from related companies and send it to you.
| That's beyond "hate", it's the opposite: you are
| interested in _any_ offerings but are not sure of who
| will you go to.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This was covered earlier in the thread. Print buyers in
| certain markets - mostly technical - appreciated the
| catalog model.
|
| This does not mean they would pay more for advertising.
|
| There were markets - specifically classifieds and
| listings - where buyers did very much want to pay for
| ads. But those were very specialised, and it's debatable
| whether a personal sales listing (dating notice, pet
| offer, etc) is in any way similar to a corporate ad.
|
| Realistically, absolutely no one was going to pay for a
| version of Computer Shopper which had zero independent
| content and was just a giant ad directory.
|
| Just as absolutely no one [1] will pay money to view a
| movie presentation made entirely of ads. Or watch a TV
| channel [2]. Or listen to a radio stream. Or view a web
| site.
|
| [1] It's possible there are a few individuals who would
| do this, but clearly not enough to support a viable
| market.
|
| [2] You might think Home Shopping Network, but HSN is
| free to air not pay to view.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Fortunately, now we _do_ have the internet. And if I ever
| want or need something, I can research it myself on
| demand or ask my friends, rather than rely on advertisers
| wasting my valuable time and attention with their junk.
| depingus wrote:
| There's indeed a tolerance point for most people
| for...pain. That doesn't make it desirable. Just the fact
| that you framed it with the world "tolerance" already
| implies a negative association.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to
| genuinely changing what they want?
|
| This isn't a bad line of reasoning, but it prompts the
| question: is it good for amoral, profit-focused corporations
| to genuinely change what people want?
|
| There is a real philosophy that people's wants and behaviors
| are primarily influenced by environment, but that doesn't
| absolve us from asking questions about whether they way
| they're being influenced is healthy and in their best
| interest. Instead, it prompts us to ask ourselves how to make
| that manipulation more ethical and how to tell the difference
| between re-engineering people in an ethical way and re-
| engineering them for selfish/unethical reasons.
|
| Ideally, we want to give people some degree of agency over
| how they're influenced. At the very least, we want the people
| manipulating them to have their best interests at heart.
| Advertisers don't. If people genuinely want Pepsi, and the
| reason is that Pepsi made them genuinely want Pepsi, that
| isn't necessarily a better outcome. We still have to ask why
| Pepsi chose to do that, and whether some desires are
| healthier than others, and whether Pepsi should have that
| kind of power over a population?
|
| In general, we view top-down control over people's actual
| personalities as dystopian-adjacent, or at least very
| dangerous and tricky to navigate. Most people on this forum
| would react negatively to the idea of a government
| brainwashing or even genuinely shaping people in a highly
| manipulated way so that they felt a stab of pleasure every
| time they voted for a particular political party. At the
| least, we would want to think about the long-term
| consequences of that manipulation. And a corporation isn't
| special, we should have the same fears about them.
|
| Your desires may not be "pure", and you may legitimately
| enjoy everything you buy, but if that's the case and you're
| correct that advertising makes you actually like things, your
| desires were still manipulated in such a way that satisfying
| them required giving a company money. It's worth asking
| whether or not that is a parasitic relationship, given that
| the implication behind it is that you could have also been
| manipulated to enjoy something that didn't require giving a
| company money. Under your theory, a company took steps to
| make sure that didn't happen. In the worst-case scenario,
| it's like engineering someone to enjoy cleaning specifically
| my house for free and then going back to their house to live
| in poverty. You can still argue that is an exploitative
| action, even if the end result is that they like what's
| happening.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Thanks for that perspective. When reading these replies,
| each person contributes such a distinct and yet clear
| analysis, it begs the question of whether we are delivering
| the intended outcome of an agent provocateur.
| Alternatively, can one view today's advertising techniques
| in a positive light? The mental gymnastics required to
| answer that question are certainly more acrobatic if you
| choose any but the most shallow reply. This is the nature
| of insidious yet profitable devices. We all know the
| answer, but the persistence required to defeat these
| efforts is beyond most.
| MereInterest wrote:
| What was the first time you were disappointed by a toy as a
| child? When you opened the box, starting playing with it, and
| found that it didn't live up to your expectations. Were those
| expectations based on a reasonable evaluation of the toy, or
| were they based on the excited cheers that played over tv
| commercials for the toy? Who deliberately cultivated
| unrealistic expectations, profiting from your disappointment?
|
| How much time do you spend researching a product today before
| buying it? There's definitely a process of seeking out
| reviews, going to many different sites, comparing and
| weighing results. How much of your time is spent wondering if
| a review is from a buyer, or from the seller? How long does
| it take to evaluate the search results, finding out which
| ones are truthful and which ones are carefully curated
| blogspam with active SEO? How much is your time worth, and
| whose fault is it for having spread that misinformation?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that
| advertising makes you want things in a way that 's wrong, as
| opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you
| normally want things?_
|
| Yes. Silently building user profiles with no consent, selling
| that info with no consent, leaving it unsecured for malicious
| actors to take, etc. are all _wrong_.
|
| Granted, this is not the only method of advertising, but it
| is probably the most prevalent.
| alecbz wrote:
| I think you're answering the question "is modern
| advertising bad for any reason?", I asked "is this
| particular facet of advertising actually bad?"
| teucris wrote:
| Note that author made an explicit attempt to delineate
| between the act of advertising and data collection
| practices.
|
| Those things are bad, but I appreciate that he's trying to
| have a discussion just on ads.
| titzer wrote:
| > philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that
| advertising makes you want things in a way that's wrong
|
| In Buddhism, all wanting is "dukkha"--quite literally,
| suffering, dissatisfaction. Advertising is about as anti-
| Buddhist as you could possibly be. IMHO advertising is
| creating a fundamental source of dissatisfaction in order to
| reap a monetary reward. It is, at its base, a soulless and
| cruel thing.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > I'm sure this is a line of reasoning ad-apologists use all
| the time but... philosophically, is there really a way we can
| claim that advertising makes you want things in a way that's
| wrong, as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like
| when you normally want things?
|
| Once upon a time, at least some advertising was "Joe's store
| has cantaloupes". When cantaloupes were seasonal, you didn't
| know that unless you went into Joe's store and looked.
| Telling you that gave you information you didn't have before.
| It was useful. If you wanted cantaloupes, you went to Joe's
| store. If the thought of cantaloupes was appealing, you at
| least thought about it. If you didn't like cantaloupes, you
| ignored it.
|
| Is that wrong? I would say no.
|
| But advertising got a lot more sophisticated. Now it's more
| like a quote I read: "The goal of advertising is to make the
| person you are envy the person you could be with the product.
| In other words, the point is to steal your satisfaction and
| then offer to sell it back to you."[1]
|
| Is _that_ wrong? I would say yes.
|
| How does advertising do that? When it shows how cool you
| would be if you used the product. Or how sexy. Or how you'd
| get the girl or the guy. Or how uncool/unsexy the people who
| _don 't_ use it are.
|
| Watch ads on TV or Youtube or wherever for a little bit. How
| many are giving you information that something is out there?
| How many are trying to tell you that you'd be cooler or
| sexier if you bought their thing?
|
| [1] I don't remember the source, or I would give credit where
| due.
| cwkoss wrote:
| > as opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when
| you normally want things?
|
| Wants do not cause enjoyment. Desire is the root of all
| suffering.
| ctoth wrote:
| A part I feel like you're missing is that it's perfectly
| possible for someone to want less, and to have their wants
| stimulated by ads. So whereas the person might have been
| perfectly content before (pre-ad) they now want something
| that they otherwise wouldn't, which induces demand that
| didn't exist. You're focusing on fungibility of wants and
| ignoring the idea of totally new wants arising from
| advertising.
| sdoering wrote:
| In general I would agree. I was thinking about what you
| wrote in my current context. I very much don't like ads. I
| don't like the described feeling of generated want.
|
| On the other hand I am currently trying to help a local
| rural coworking space find an audience and customers.
|
| So I plan to additionally to other means also employ search
| advertising targeting keywords that people use when looking
| for a coworking space. Locally targeted and so on.
|
| Am I creating demand? Or am I trying to shift demand from
| potential others in the market towards my client?
|
| I would say a bit of both. Because in targeting keywords I
| will probably also reach people not looking for a coworking
| desk right now, but are informing themselves. In them I
| might create the wish to try it. But others might look at
| the place and decide to give it a try instead of the place
| in the next big town.
|
| So I am actually torn between both views.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Are you sure ads are "nagging" people as opposed to
| genuinely changing what they want?
|
| Yes. I'm susceptible to this. I became aware recently. I use
| and collect fountains pens & inks, and I collected a
| considerable collection. Unsubscribing from vendors mailing
| lists, and not visiting related sites reduced my desire to
| get new things and I enjoy what I have more.
|
| It's same for Humble Bundle's books, and some other items
| too.
|
| In short, I'm sure. Seeing less advertisements make me want
| stuff way less, and use what I have more.
|
| At the end of the day, yes, advertisement is manufactured
| demand. Esp. with all the psychological research behind it.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I have no problem with people nagging me and annoying me _in
| their own premises_. It 's another matter if the persuaders
| are after me in the street, or in my own home.
|
| I find TV advertising increasingly annoying, because (like
| me) most people skip TV ads; so they are pitches to the
| bottom of the barrel nowadays - ads for home equity
| withdrawal, incontinence pads, and charities. But I only see
| them if I'm too drunk or tired to skip. I dislike them, but I
| can avoid them. (I assume the charity ads are given away,
| because the slot didn't sell)
|
| I do object to the invasion of public spaces with ads. It's
| reasonable to advertise in your own shop-window. But I object
| to billboards on highways, "I lost 20 kilos" ads on buses,
| ambulance-chaser ads on taxis and so on.
|
| Advertising on web-properties: I dislike it, because it tends
| to distort the content on the website. When did you last read
| an online recipe that didn't start with a long and boring
| essay about "my grandma from Rome"? But I'm free to stay away
| from those sites.
|
| Advertising on search-engines is harder to avoid.
|
| I think advertising is in principle reasonable; it's hard to
| enter a market if you can't tell people that you're there.
| But most advertising isn't just telling people you're there;
| it's mostly shouty, intrusive brand advertising, trying to
| compete for attention with all the other shouty, intrusive
| brand advertising. That I can do without.
| convolvatron wrote:
| we're supposed to be telling the market what to produce
| through demand signals. this is how we believe that monetary
| value translates directly into personal value. if instead the
| market tells us what to buy - who is driving?
| causi wrote:
| _philosophically, is there really a way we can claim that
| advertising makes you want things in a way that 's wrong, as
| opposed to in way that causes enjoyment just like when you
| normally want things?_
|
| If I have a product I know someone will want and attempt to
| sell it to them, I'm doing a good thing. If I have a product
| I know someone shouldn't buy and attempt to sell it to them,
| I'm doing a bad thing. If I don't give a damn what they want
| and attempt to sell it to them, the probability of falling on
| the "bad thing" end of the spectrum is very high.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The real problem is that we have a default theory of value:
| stuff is just worth whatever people paid for it, otherwise
| they wouldn't have paid for it is the short version. It's a
| gaping hole in our economic theories, and unsurprisingly
| advertisers have driven a goods train through it.
|
| It arises here because we're trying to figure out whether
| people are paying for stuff they don't benefit from (or don't
| benefit enough to make it worth the price), which to many
| people seems intuitively the case, but it's quite hard to
| flesh out an argument for how it's could happen when we think
| people only pay for stuff that they want.
| psd1 wrote:
| Closest I can get is Type 1 and Type 2 fun (i.e. does it
| still seem fun in hindsight).
|
| We might need to quantify wisdom.
| shard wrote:
| Following these thoughts, and flipping the argument the other
| way:
|
| For those of you reading who are against advertising, do you
| advertise your abilities and skillsets to potential employers
| that you wish to work for by sending them resumes and
| requesting meetings? Or do you just put your work on the
| internet and hope they discover it on their own? Perhaps for
| big-giant-recognizable names, the second method could work
| (just like Microsoft doesn't have to advertise Windows, I'm
| sure if John Carmack tweets an interest to join some startup,
| the startup would ping him), but for most people, including
| me, we have to rely on prettifying our resumes to catch the
| attention of employers.
| natdempk wrote:
| Just as a note, Microsoft literally does advertise for
| Windows, and considers it valuable to do so or they would
| not. They even brag about doing so: https://blogs.windows.c
| om/windowsexperience/2021/09/09/micro...
| Jiejeing wrote:
| This is a terrible analogy, because I certainly don't have
| billions to spend to put billboards of me near the places I
| want to be hired at. Sending a resume to recruiters is part
| of the hiring process (although, arguably, in our trade, it
| is often the other way around as well), being constantly
| bothered to buy more crap or subscribe to new services is
| not part of the buying process.
| shard wrote:
| The point about $B is a matter of scale, so I don't think
| it matters, unless you are saying that companies with
| only $hundreds to spend on ads do not count as
| advertising.
|
| The point about it being part of the hiring process seems
| to be pointing out that it is a codified and accepted
| process. If presenting ads are a codified and accepted
| practice (which I could argue it already is), does that
| make it acceptable?
| m4x wrote:
| I don't think that's a good analogy. We don't generally
| post our resumes as inline adverts on web pages, or on
| billboards outside tech campuses, hoping for a job.
| Companies start the conversation by creating a role and
| giving it to recruiters or advertising on a job board. We
| are basically just responding with the requested
| information.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh? So by a similar theory, it's ok when abused women stay
| with abusive husbands because who knows what people truly
| want? Like if the abuse has made them "genuinely" want to
| stay in an abusive situation, that's cool, and in fact
| justifies other dudes abusing women until they get the women
| to that point?
|
| Me, I'm going to stay away from the galaxy-brain stuff and
| come down on the side of, "It's morally wrong to manipulate
| people to put money in my pockets regardless of how it
| affects them." In this age of instant connection and infinite
| on-demand information, there is no lack of ways to find out
| about new products that I enjoy.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >there is no lack of ways to find out about new products
| that I enjoy. //
|
| Man, when I'm trying to find products I can never find what
| I want because the websites - Amazon, urgh - don't expose
| the characteristics I want to search on.
|
| Companies (with few exceptions) don't care if you want it,
| they care if you buy it. Often it seems things are made
| opaque on purpose.
|
| Example, I was buying a house phone (aside: I imagine it's
| the last time I'll ever do that) and know I need
| answerphone, but with self-recorded message and with call
| monitoring.
|
| Even BT, a phone maker and phone service provider only
| expose search at the level of "answerphone". Useless.
|
| I had to download the manuals and read the usage
| instructions. And of course the sellers don't provide the
| manuals (in general, I mean BT didn't have the manuals for
| the lower priced BT phones, crazy).
|
| Ebay are pretty good, not perfect.
|
| Other example, buying graphics cards, you can't search for
| "8gb graphics card" on a bunch of sites, you gave to choose
| AMD or Nvidia cards first.
|
| Then you get the search results and the most expensive
| cards are above your top-price and they're ordered by
| "recommended", argh.
| autokad wrote:
| a lot of people opine on adds have no idea what its like to run
| a business.
|
| do you think big businesses want adds? they'd love to get rid
| of them. then no one could ever knock them out of their spot.
| They'd just rule by dominance and no one would ever know about
| the competition.
|
| its not brain washing. advertising is no different than finding
| a mate, finding an employer, finding an employee.
|
| what needs to stop is absolute narrow minded thought. thats
| what 'This business model really needs to stop.' is. like
| really, stop. the world isnt like you, what you propose is not
| feasible and is in fact harmful to almost everyone.
|
| I dont want to pay for facebook, so I deal with adds. Also,
| quite a few times I saw things I really needed/wanted on
| facebook. it was beneficial. I don't want to view adds on
| youtube, so I pay for the premium service. vey few people are
| willing to do so, even when capable. but there is a key point
| here, CHOICE.
|
| Stop this one way thinking and understand the world is more
| complex
| mping wrote:
| Advertising: I agree with the interface, the implementation
| sucks.
| xnx wrote:
| It gets worse when you realize that a lot of manufacturing
| demand is convincing people to feel bad about their current
| situation.
| projektfu wrote:
| An interesting read is Galbraith's "The New Industrial State"
| which lays out an argument that the US is also a planned
| economy, just with non-state planners. It came out before the
| 80s so things have changed from the era of corporate
| conglomerates in the US, but the underlying nature of
| advertising as a mechanism for generating the demand that is
| allowing companies to continue to convert resources into
| sellable products I think is spot on.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Industrial_State
| cryptica wrote:
| What makes matters worse is that the current monetary system of
| centralized currency issuance creates an anti-competitive
| environment which increases the power of advertising. Supply-
| side economics is demand-constrained so the game is all about
| the monopolization of consumers... Which is good for
| advertising.
|
| Under a demand side economy, nobody has priority access to
| cheap capital so the constraint is on the production side (this
| is more natural)... So acquisition of consumers is a secondary
| concern. It's more about product quality and production
| efficiency. It's not feasible to fool consumers with
| artificially deflated prices (subsidized by cheap capital from
| above) and spamming of ads.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Linux got its start from advertising.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#The_creation_...
| blahblahblah75 wrote:
| well I would go as far as saying advertising is corporate
| propaganda...
| f154hfds wrote:
| Advertisements exist on a spectrum of manipulation. For
| example, old ads in the 50's sometimes used phallic subliminal
| messaging to attempt to get viewers to misappropriate their
| sexual urges with the thing being advertised (no kidding, see
| [1]). Even though it probably doesn't work it's the mindset
| behind the attempt that is gross. The goal was to manipulate.
|
| On the other side of the spectrum you have the ole soap in the
| pickup's window saying For Sale. Somewhere between these two
| extremes is a line where advertisements go from being ethical
| to being unethical. Clean one-size-fits-all solutions don't
| work here, we have to go through the trouble of defining what
| manipulation is and when it applies. Simply telling people that
| your product/service exists in the world is not by itself
| manipulation period.
|
| [1] https://www.tonyacardinali.com/blog/18-hidden-messages-in-
| ad...
| vatican_banker wrote:
| > Because advertising is manufactured demand.
|
| I see advertising radically different.
|
| People exhibit an spectrum of interest in products in the
| market, from "zero interest in buying" to "shut up and take my
| money". Advertising works by convincing people close to the
| "shut up and take my money" part of the spectrum to actually
| buy.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not a marketeer.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I guess kickstarter is basically advertising and should be
| banned.
|
| Paying for an ad on a result in a google search for legos is
| manufacturing demand for a product?
|
| I think any serious discussion has to be about the ad medium.
|
| I had email thanks to netzero way back in the day because it
| was ad driven, I think it's perfectly fine for an adult to
| consent to ads in exchange for services. I couldn't afford
| AOL, so without that service I have no idea how I would have
| gotten into email. I couldn't afford 10 cents a minute long
| distance calls and my physycial mail never got to my
| grandparents overseas.
|
| Billboards on the other hand... those are intrusive...
| buildings with their company logos by the highway, maybe
| those are too.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Yes. And sometimes it even connects people with 'I have this
| thorny problem to which I would love to buy a solution
| instead of relying on manual workarounds' with people selling
| the actual solution, leading to win-win for everyone.
| amelius wrote:
| Or they could just Google for it, or ask an expert.
| shard wrote:
| Interesting ironic comment. Googling for a solution is
| implicitly asking Google to serve you ads regarding that
| solution.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Search results aren't ads, they're links to resources you
| asked for. Just like the contact list on your phone.
| shard wrote:
| I'm sure you know that when you use Google, search
| results are a side effect which is used to draw you to
| use Google, the main product being provided are the ads.
| toss1 wrote:
| I'd say it _REALLY_ depends on the implementation model.
|
| Non-intrusive adverts that are relevant to the content are
| something that I sometimes literally seek out - because they
| bring me information that I want, and may lead me closer to
| buying a thing I want. I've even been frustrated that an advert
| displays, and when I try to view it again to get more info,
| it's already gone. Sometimes, I buy trade magazines just for
| the adverts, or to scan the sponsors/advertisers guide at the
| back.
|
| At the other extreme are popup/pop-over/slide-over adverts
| especially on mobile that we cannot get rid of. Those are not
| an exchange of a portion of my attention to support what I'm
| reading, they are a wholesale hijacking of my attention and
| holding hostage the thing I want to read/view. It is literally
| like walking into the store and having my pocket picked.
|
| One model is completely legit, and the other is pretty much
| spam and legal constraints could be justified.
| spullara wrote:
| Without advertising how are you going to find out about
| anything? Are you going to search all the buildings in your
| neighborhood to try and figure out which one sells food?
| Signage is advertising. Every way for you to find out about
| anything to buy is advertising. You can have an opinion that
| some forms of advertising you would like to curtail but a
| blanket statement is nonsensical.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Without advertising how are you going to find out about
| anything?
|
| From friends, online communities, search, ...
|
| In some places it's illegal to publicly advertise alcohol or
| indicate where it's sold. People still manage to get drunk
| without a problem.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Every way for you to find out about anything to buy is
| advertising._
|
| I don't think that's right. If I use a product, like it, and
| tell my friends about it, that isn't advertising because it
| isn't funded by anyone who gains from the purchase of the
| product. Similarly, Consumer Reports isn't advertising,
| because they are funded by their members. General review orgs
| like The Wirecutter may or may not be advertising, depending
| on how successful they are at preventing manufacturers from
| influencing their reviews.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Without advertising how are you going to find out about
| anything?
|
| If I don't know I have a problem to solve I probably don't
| have a problem to solve, or at least not a problem big enough
| that it requires me to be forced to consume hours of
| advertisement per year
| libertine wrote:
| But that's the same as saying _ignorance is a bliss_.
|
| You might have problems but you haven't thought about them,
| or in some case you can't even verbalize them.
|
| Other times problems just become background noise, and
| they're there in plain sight but you're used to them - and
| they can have negative impact on your life.
|
| We're not machines, problems aren't binary.
|
| Now if you say that we as a society, sometimes, value the
| "wrong things" (which is subjective) and see problems that
| aren't a big deal, it's true. But you can't pin that on
| advertising - those are symptoms of poor education systems,
| poor health, and I'd go as far as poor value systems.
| elvis10ten wrote:
| Well a problem could be averted before you have it. There
| are lots of examples: Like buying a kinesis keyboard before
| you actually get RSI. Or an ergonomic chair. You were
| heading towards a problem, but might not know without an
| "ad".
| amelius wrote:
| Information can spread without advertising being involved.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Advertising is just information with a price tag, so no.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Basically search is the answer. Search on Amazon, search on
| the Internet and find the manufacturer's web site, etc.
|
| Google convinced manufacturers that they should also
| advertise but it was working just fine without the
| advertisements.
| [deleted]
| operator-name wrote:
| Search and advertisements go hand in hand - they both short
| circuit foraging.
| xigoi wrote:
| Right now, you're using a site that allows you to discover
| IT-related products without advertizing.
| jefftk wrote:
| And it is funded through paid placement for job ads for YC
| companies.
| dtjb wrote:
| I think a large number of HN posts can be grouped under the
| term advertising. Spreading awareness of a product,
| company, or service is probably the number one motivator
| for posting things here.
| xigoi wrote:
| But people actively go here to look for new products.
| It's not like if you want to watch a video and you get an
| ad in your face.
| toto444 wrote:
| > Because advertising is manufactured demand.
|
| Some companies spend a lot on advertising but their product
| does not sell. How does your model explains this ?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Of course there are many factors involved, but in the end
| increased demand is the primary goal of advertising.
|
| If it were purely about informing that the product exists,
| ads could just be text instead of flashy animated popups.
| That's a form of advertising I could get behind. Would even
| be more accessible.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I totally, 100% agree.
|
| I tell people sometimes that if I could go back in time and do
| one thing I thought would make the world better today, I would
| try and kill Hitler. Partly because everybody tries to kill
| Hitler, and it never works. He survived about a zillion
| assassination plots and quite a few actual attempts. It's
| almost like he's got some kind of special protection or
| something.
|
| No, I would kill a contemporary of his, though: Sigmund Freud's
| nephew, Edward Bernays. He is single-handedly responsible for
| most of the way advertising and PR are constructed today. He
| literally introduced the concept of FOMO in advertising. He's
| not _everything_ that 's wrong with society today, but taking
| him out has a decent chance of improving things. Besides, he's
| not constantly guarded by SS soldiers, or anything, so it would
| be easier than killing Hitler.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it's quite necessary to differentiate two different
| values that advertising delivers. Advertising allows products
| to overcome obscurity so that consumers are made aware of the
| product and Advertising allows products to stimulate demand in
| the market.
|
| The first kind of advertising is the one we can pretty much all
| get behind - if you offer a service that's better than a
| competitor advertising can allow you to overcome the natural
| knowledge and networking advantages that your competitors might
| be skating by on to keep their sub-par product selling. This
| kind of advertising allows goliaths to be thrown down by davids
| and can help improve folks quality of life by minimizing the
| amount they're spending on unnecessarily inefficient products.
| This kind of advertising has been around forever and
| constituted the vast majority of advertising up until very
| recently - once a brand was well established they'd start
| slashing advertising since their reach was already pretty
| effectively covering the market space.
|
| The second kind of advertising is to drive up demand in
| consumers that already know who you are - into this bucket
| falls every ford advertisement since about 1940 and every Coke
| ad since the 60s - these products are already completely known
| by consumers. CocaCola doesn't run advertisements because
| they're afraid you've never heard of their product, it runs
| advertisements to drive up demand - and the advertisements of
| competitors products are usually symbiotic - whether Coke or
| Pepsi sponsored the ad you just saw doesn't generally matter,
| you're going to end up buying a soda and in a significant
| number of places you can purchase one there is a local monopoly
| anyways - rare is the restaurant where you can get a Coke and
| your date can get a Pepsi. These advertisements _intend_ to
| modify your preferences and create demand - rather than
| insuring that their product is known as one of the options to
| fulfill an existing demand... if you believe Coke advertisers
| don 't believe everyone on earth is aware of their product then
| I've got a bridge to sell you.
|
| The second kind of advertising makes up nearly all of modern
| advertising, it is a parasitic practice that reduces the
| efficacy of the free market (by levying a cost on attention in
| exchange for no added information delivered to the consumer).
| It is also responsible for the aggressive increase in
| obnoxiousness of advertising - since you're not trying to
| simply inform a consumer but you're actively competing with
| other advertisers for the limited amount of manufactured demand
| that each consumer can afford.
|
| In my eye this second form of advertising is utterly without
| value and if we need to ditch the first form to safely escape
| the second form its still absolutely worth it.
| ambientenv wrote:
| Advertising, marketing, propaganda [1], campaigning,
| "persuasion", there are lots of words across a broad spectrum
| of, what is, a variation on a theme. Ultimately it comes down
| to manipulation delivered through multiple methods. Perhaps
| sometimes that manipulation is unavoidable, maybe even
| beneficial and not nefarious. But when you look at it in the
| context of economics - a "science" that is an artificial
| construct with none of the immutability of, say, the laws of
| physics, even though in some circles it is treated and
| discussed as such - and our false god, capitalism, it is vital,
| if not intrinsic to that domain.
|
| It is our system a values, collectively, as a culture and a
| society, that allows it to continue and thrive, albeit often
| having to adapt. Because to ultimate goal is to keep us
| spending. To keep us acquiescing, complacent and conforming
| even when we believe we are not, striving to contribute to the
| not-so-greater good. Generating monetary wealth, not
| necessarily for ourselves, at the expense of, one could say,
| the wealth of the planet.
|
| We've been groomed [2] in this way for a long time now. And the
| discontinuities that are beginning to manifest [3] are
| revealing how brittle and finite it all is.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self [3a]
| https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet-ready-for-wh...
| [3b] https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/discontinuity-is-the-
| job
| js8 wrote:
| I agree, I think people who ask "well how do you know the
| product exists" are missing the point of advertisement, which
| is not to inform people by factual arguments and discussion,
| but to convince them through emotional manipulation.
|
| > On average, it's manipulation, brainwashing and
| commodification of well told lies.
|
| What's even worse, the same emotional manipulation methods that
| are used in advertising are now applied to the political
| domain, and they seem to lead to increased misinformation and
| political spectrum fragmentation. It is especially easy to
| instill hate or anger into people.
|
| I don't think modern society, where people are expected to be
| as rational as possible (in order to participate in improving
| the society), can survive if at the same time, we weaken this
| rationality by circumventing it through an endless stream of
| emotional manipulation.
|
| In the 18th and 19th century, it became widely accepted that
| public education is beneficial for everyone, i.e. it's worth
| teaching everybody how to read and write, as well as other
| stuff like civics. It's not obvious at all this is the case,
| there certainly was lot of resistance to this idea from elitist
| classes of nobles and clerics.
|
| I think there is a similar conflict coming up in 21st century,
| where we will have to recognize, to progress as a civilization,
| all humans should have the right to be as emotionally stable as
| possible (and learn the psychological tools to that effect), so
| they could make rational decisions most of the time. But the
| very existence of advertising and other forms of commercial
| psychological manipulation threatens this general right, and so
| they will fight against that very idea.
| endymi0n wrote:
| > This business model really needs to stop.
|
| Let me offer a different perspective: I'm as little pro
| advertising as I am pro drugs, but I see both of them in a
| similar way: As having some negative consequences to society,
| but also being backed by a real world demand that doesn't stop
| at the borders of legality.
|
| And the same way alcohol prohibition counter-intuitively had an
| even more negative effect on society, the same thing would
| happen with advertising.
|
| I would rather tolerate transparent advertising with a clear,
| public framework and enforceable rules than I would want to
| tolerate a world where advertising demand creeps into every
| other form of communication.
|
| We already live in a world where it's hard to trust any person
| or organization. I'm personally against drastically making that
| problem worse.
| wpietri wrote:
| Your theory is that people who are willing to manipulate
| others choose to stop at standard advertising?
|
| A long time ago I had a friend who did "contemporary
| marketing" for Budweiser. Half her hours were spent getting
| bar owners Bud Light neons. The other half were sitting in
| bars, drinking Bud with other beautiful people while wearing
| Budweiser clothing.
|
| Who knows what horrors they've invented in the years since.
| But I will bet cash money that there are a lot of them.
|
| The main difference between advertising and booze is that
| beer consumers wanted beer, but advertising consumers don't
| want ads. (In the rare case that they do, they can just go
| look at corporate YouTube channels.) So there's no particular
| reason to suspect society would be any worse off if we banned
| advertising.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Because advertising is manufactured demand
|
| Not at all. When there's something I need, how am I supposed to
| find it without looking at advertising and marketing materials?
| How am I supposed to even find out a product I could use
| exists?
|
| If you need your roof fixed, whatcha going to do? If your
| favorite band is coming to town, how would you know? If your
| bank is now offering a cash back credit card you want, how are
| you going to find out about it? If you're on a road trip and
| you're hungry, which exit has your favorite burgers?
| yifanl wrote:
| So should it be pull or push-based? Because all the cases
| you've stated imply one, whereas the active tracking
| pervasive in modern advertising implies the other.
|
| Disclaimer: I work in adtech.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've bought things I didn't know existed because of push
| advertising. For example, ads for upcoming movies I didn't
| know would interest me. Songs I hear on the radio I never
| heard before and like and want to buy. Tools that make my
| life easier working on my car that I didn't know existed.
| yifanl wrote:
| Sure, but the demand for these things didn't exist
| _until_ you saw the ad, and the value add becomes that
| much more abstract: i.e. what if there's a movie you
| would've liked more instead?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Um, a product that saves me time and money doesn't help
| me if I don't know about it.
|
| > what if there's a movie you would've liked more
| instead?
|
| Since they didn't advertise it, I lose, and the movie
| company lost.
| amelius wrote:
| > If you need your roof fixed, whatcha going to do?
|
| So you are suggesting that if my roof needs fixing, the only
| solution is that I first have to be interrupted and
| distracted numerous times during work, by various imagery and
| popups?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm responding to the idea that advertising is bad.
|
| You're talking about something different.
| glitchc wrote:
| "Hunger will do terrible things to a man's morals."
| guerrilla wrote:
| Best we keep people fed then.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Yes, we should replace "free" ad supported business models,
| which are in fact anything but, with ones where the customer
| pays and are therefore the beneficiaries of the work being
| carried out.
|
| There are technical challenges to doing this as it requires
| sufficiently frictionless micropayments, but the biggest
| challenge is cultural. People are pretty addicted to "free"
| crap, so it's far from a given that most people will ever be
| willing to pay whatever arguments there are in favour of it.
| I think there's something of a pushback brewing though.
| guerrilla wrote:
| No, I meant it's literally in everyone's interest to keep
| everyone fed.
| omnicognate wrote:
| The relevance to the article or discussion being...?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If nobody was ever in a position where they had to
| compromise their principles in order to not die, it would
| be easier to look down on people who _do_ compromise
| their principles for money.
| omnicognate wrote:
| That's what I thought you meant. So in the analogy that
| means we should ensure people have a source of income
| that means they don't have to compromise their (anti-ad)
| principles as the author did. Which I agree with.
|
| If you didn't mean to further the analogy but instead
| were expressing a general desire to live in a Star Trek
| like post scarcity world then I'm with you on that too,
| but I don't see the relevance.
| the8472 wrote:
| I suspect the disagreement stems from the idea that to
| remove advertising we have to find another way for people
| to pay for services which are currently ad-financed. It
| neglects other options such as those services getting
| banned and ceasing to exist because they're not
| economical.
|
| Or perhaps, if ads have any positive value at all,
| capturing that value in a less adversarial way and
| financing things we want through that. E.g. if we had an
| objective recommender service that made the economy more
| efficient we could tax it somehow and distribute those
| taxes to economically marginal but desirable services.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| In an economic system where generating capital did not lead
| production ads would not exist, but information would.
| Information on products. Not emotional manipulation for
| consumption, but technical knowledge of tools.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "My business makes $900 a month from ads." You don't have a
| business.
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