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I think much of the value you lost went into the pockets of your landlord and the local businesses you patronize (which is what you wanted?). How exactly do you suggest your money ends up in the pockets of advertisers? I'd love to hear it.

I guess, cities advertise for themselves because of tax reasons (you work there, you pay your taxes there). And ads for cities are supported by local businesses. They pay for the ads and get paid by you in return, if you fall for the ads and move.

You have to be careful if you start thinking that way. It's a good way to think, but it takes care. I can just as easily draw diagrams that prove that all the money ends up in government's hands: 25% of your income is tax, %X of your spend goes to cover taxes paid by various corporations which have to cover the taxes of all their corporations which are covering taxes of all those corporations all of which have to pay their employees who pay taxes so all labor costs are also hidden taxes, my gosh, everywhere you look it's just money going to the government! The solution is that at each step, other money is also coming in, diluting the "tax" flow in various ways before everything ends up there. Likewise "advertising" and "inefficiencies" and "the pockets of the 1%" and all sorts of other things like that.

I doubt very much of the cost-of-living delta between a city and a suburb or the country has to do with advertising.

Those are tourism ads

The rent is high because of demand - Which is driven by advertising - Which someone has to pay for.

If only we knew who's buying all the advertising, maybe it would start making sense.

Walk me through the causal process here. Does it go something like...

Landlords want more money so they devise a massive marketing campaign, including a complete cultural narrative, TV series, movies, and even gasp whole companies created out of thin air.

They infiltrate media outlets to con dreamers into coming to their city, and expect to charge them 10x more than they used to pay in rent. They have to, after all, to cover the costs of the largest ad campaign ever created in the universe.

And it's a massive success! It just worked. Whoa.

Or... Maybe that's just not very realistic.

Maybe your rent is high because you live in a city with a flourishing job market for highly qualified and highly paid workers who came there to find new jobs, and whose real estate market has a chronically low supply of housing due to various cultural or regulatory reasons.

Maybe there's a convergence of shared interests across all advertisers that serves to create a culture of consumption? I don't think it's that hard to explain or that it requires the positing of any sort of conspiracy.

Maybe there is a whole human culture of consumption and it isn't the advertisers fault that humans are greedy. No need to play the victim card all the time.

Or maybe they exist symbiotically? And the role advertising plays is to accelerate the feedback loop in a way that's beneficial to the interests of their employers.

Not to mention, advertising often has been used to create markets out of thin air:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.ht...

You don't think it's hard to explain what?

How advertising causes high rents in San Francisco?

Be my guest.

It's not hard to find reasons other than conspiracies, to explain the role of advertising in creating a consumption culture.

If by "consumption culture" you mean "sales", then yeah.

A sale in and of itself doesn't necessarily imply a broader ideology about what it means to be a consumer. There was a time before consumer culture when we still had sales.

While consumer culture certainly includes sales, it's also about deeper things such as associating your identity and self esteem with consumption, the way those ideas intertwine with culture, the psychological structures through which those ideas are mediated, and the way it all congeals into a way of life.

> advertising is much more powerful/effective today than it ever was before

There's just so much information available to us now through the internet/TV/radio that it has really become exhausting to conduct the necessary critical analysis to defend against malicious ads. Who is funding this advertisement and why - how does the value flow back into their pocket at the end of the day? If the ad industry keeps the firehose on, we get tired of asking these questions, and some ads will inevitably get through our mental defenses.

Sometimes biased/misleading ads are pretty easy to spot, such as in most Tech Crunch/VentureBeat articles where the product or service that is being "objectively reviewed" or covered on a seeming whim is clearly sponsored content. In some other cases its much harder...PG's 2005 essay "The Submarine" [1] is a great read and continues to gain relevance 10 years later. PR/ad agencies manufacture what is hot and trending, and it's usually incredibly hard to determine how or why.

So I've engaged two different strategies to help deal with malicious and/or deeply submerged ads:

(1) Disconnecting from many social media sites that serve as media/info aggregators. Facebook, snapchat, and instagram all had to go. I stay on HN because I find the community to be a bit more ad conscious and averse, but it always pays to remember that HN is both a great tool for discussion and a marketing tool for YC.

(2) Engaging friends and family heavily before making any sort of major "upgrade" decision. Perhaps your friends in said city would have had some interesting advice to share with you about your move had you asked for their frank and honest opinions beforehand.

One negative side effect of the constant barrage of ads/info is a certain critical, skeptical, and frankly negative mindset that has become SOP when digesting any new information. It's really a problem of trust at the end of the day, which is the fabric of any healthy and productive unit, whether that be a relationship, a family, or a society. It's not a new problem, but I feel like it's a hard and important one that has increased in difficulty with the rise of the internet.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

But the hilarious part is that by your definition , HackerNews is an advertisement.

Because that's what it's doing. Selling a particular lifestyle.

I don't think it's too much of a leap to call HN a promoter of YC.

It could absolutely be considered 'influencer marketing' with the popularity of YC alum posts and the aggressive moderation of opposing viewpoints.

There are two kinds of ADS in my book:

One kind is an appeal to the person in some general fashion. The usual forms apply. There isn't much of a value add, beyond the appeal. "Ours is 2x better", or "You will feel GREAT!", etc...

The other kind is a value add, in that something of value is given in return for a bit of mindshare or implied consideration. This is HN, and a lot of other content marketing type approaches. Some use forums for discussion, others blogs, still others white papers, and or maybe things like apps, or data one can make use of.

In my own personal thoughts, I refer to this as, "give 'em a cookie. Who doesn't like a free cookie?" And when they take the cookie, they will often give you that little bit of consideration, or a contact address, opinion, something.

Musicians do this by dropping free to play and sometimes free to download tracks. "Here's your cookie, I'm selling more in the store."

I'm generally OK with value added type advertising. I like my free cookie, same as most people. The non-value added ADS are often trading on shock value, or their ability to interrupt you, or some other inane thing. Noise.

Unfortunate double meaning on the word 'cookie.'

Indeed. For my own use and thoughts, it's a non-issue. I don't often use that means to express the idea to others, because of it.

Figured the crowd here would sort it easy enough.

For me personally, I tend to map things to simple concepts in that way. Makes a lot of stuff easier, and it often highlights the common where it might not be obvious too. Just FYI.

*content marketing.

Three hundred years ago, people literally sold themselves into temporary slavery and sailed across an ocean because of advertisements that a different place would be nicer to live. I don't think the power of advertising has changed much.

I think that spoke more to the conditions they were leaving than it does to the message they received.

For sure, persuasion is all about exploiting the backdoors of your consciousness to influence your free will. Powerful stuff man.

Yes, and people left Syria to go to Europe because of advertisements too. Damn advertisers. They were behind it all along.

Preposterous.

I'd just like to point that this is brand advertising. The one people are claiming does not work on other threads.

And yes, it is very powerful. It can change the values of an entire society.

This is not brand advertising - there is no advertising (besides job listings) at all in his post.

An obvious example of this is the diamond engagement ring scam that succeeded by almost nothing but advertising. Some of that advertising was very subtle as well.

So - you actually saw ads saying, "come work in a big city and make more money?". I've never heard of this.

First, it was the whole startup craze; TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, etc... Then being exposed to startup job adverts on LinkedIn and other career sites... All these media sources together guided my decisions.

That's not advertising at all - that's news and culture. There's no shadowy conspiracy paying techcrunch et al to talk about how great big cities are. Job adverts, the only advertising part of your post, don't sell a lifestyle generally either - it's just a list of what they want and what they offer.

I've seen a number of ads saying "Come work in slightly smaller city and pay less rent."

Actual ads? Pieces of media payed for by someone?

Yep. Mitt Romney made some as gov of Mass, trying to lure biotech.

I have seen plenty of ads for jobs in North Carolina and other low cost of living locales whose call to action is "move here and pay less rent (plus have a job that might not suck)."

Tacoma in Washington State puts up billboards in Seattle every so often, targeting techies (e.g. a campaign a few years ago boasted how much better broadband was down there).

Yes. Pieces of media payed for by someone - mostly in the subway.

Why haven't you moved back? Genuinely curious.

Moving can be expensive. The majority of my current debt is due to multiple moves from state-to-state. Most of the time the moves were because of jobs. If he's unable to save money then it may be hard for him to move away.

This is mind-blowing to me. I trust there was mostly good reason to it, but why did you need to move with so many physical things? I've moved all around Europe with 3 suitcases (and even that seemed a bit excessive). But then again I've always accounted for these plans and only bought furniture of either "use and discard" or "high resale value" variety (used design classics, etc.)

Well, I don't think it's quite fair to compare different people's lifestyles in that context. Especially since I live in the US where things might be a bit different in various situations than in Europe.

Believe me, I agree with the idea of shedding useless stuff before a move. Which we have. But you tend to accumulate needed stuff with a family in tow. Also, keep in mind that the amount of money involved isn't just for moving physical items.

There's distance as well. I've moved across the entirety of the United States twice, mostly for jobs. Although it was a bit of adventurous thinking because we liked the idea of such a huge change.

I regret nothing.

> family in tow.

That does change things a bit.

Like I said, often there are some good reasons sometimes many good reasons. But as a stereotype, in the US people will have lots of material possessions, most of which are crap.

I know the comfort of having your own things that have been with you throughout the years, and everything is exactly how you're used to them. I do miss the feeling, and will eventually settle down somewhere, or at least settle down my "things" somewhere.

I still couldn't resist pointing out that being geographically mobile is a viable option, even if it does require some effort, planning and certain trade-offs.

And it isn't totally binary, it's a scale from "living out of one luggage-sized suitcase" six flags -style, through being able to pack up and leave on a week's notice, to having planned a lifestyle around moving every couple of years, to having deep roots etc..

> advertising is much more powerful/effective today than it ever was before

I'm sceptical of that. I grew up pre internet and much information on stuff to buy came from TV ads, magazines financed by advertising and the like. Now I've basically stopped watching TV and reading those, read non commercial stuff like HN and when I want to buy toys check out the review sites to see which product is best, not which has the sexiest ads. Here's a graph showing ad spend tailing off http://www.digitaltonto.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Ad-sp...

(from http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/how-digital-leakage-is-rede...)

This is a great contribution. Wish I could give it more than one upvote!

Sounds like buyers remorse, not that you were swindled.

You wanted "access to a wider range of consumer goods and services" you got that access. Now that you want to save money instead means that you just changed your mind... again.