When the real product is eyeballs on ads
You start to optimize for that.
You get users to keep reloading. You get users to stick around. Because the more pages they load, the more money you make.
It doesn't matter why people keep reloading. Doesn't matter if they're being shown things they really need. Doesn't matter if they're being shown truth or lies. Doesn't matter if they're reloading a lot because they're in the middle of a flame war. Doesn't matter if they're left happier or stressed out by using your product.
It just matters that they saw a lot of ads.
This is why the much-loathed algorithmic timelines happen: here's something a lot of your circles spent time engaging with, maybe you'll like it too! Stick around. See more ads.
Of course we can debate on the definition of what is "best" for the user. Maybe users like and need clickbait headlines and fake news. But to me it's just a softer version of "Maybe users like gambling machines and being addicted to cigarettes"
Some example: * You don't need to change toothbrush every 6 months, that's BS. Toothbrushes are plastic they are going to last hundreds of year more after we are all dead. * You don't need to put so much toothpaste on your toothbrush, it was Colgate ads that started showing people putting a fat and thick long toothpaste on toothbrushes to encourage more use/consuming of toothpaste. * The alkasetzer guys wanted to double sells, what did they do started showing commercials of people throwing 2 tablets instead of one. * Also shampoo and hairproducts, they started showing people putting a ton of shampoo in their hands and making bubbles in their head. Actually you don't need that much shampoo.
Sure, it hasn't physically decomposed, but there's no reason to expect a $1 piece of plastic to keep the same performance after hundreds of thousands of abrasions in a wet, acidic, bacteria-ridden environment.
Always go with the softest brush you can find, to spare your gums, and also try not to use all that much tooth paste. You really don't need more than just a thin flat spread over the brush, or a ball about the size of a small pea.
If your gums often bleed after brushing, you should go see a dentist. Even if it doesn't happen every day, please go.
Source: my father is a dentist and I worked for him a number of years in the past, so picked up a few things.
You can be brushing every day and still have bleeding gums, probably because your brush is too hard but possibly because of bacterial build up causing inflammation. A dentist will do a simple test to check your gums and can tell you straight away whether your gums are ok or not.
My point being, bleeding gums are just not a good thing, ever. It doesn't have to mean you have gingivitis, you could just have nicked them with too hard a brush or whatever, but you should still look it up if it happens regularly when brushing or flossing.
And obviously you should brush at least twice a day, and also floss daily (full disclosure: I'm a hypocrite on the flossing, but I try to be better) – if you eat / drink particularly acidic foodstuffs you'd do well in brushing after ingesting this as well. Brushing after every meal can be inconvenient or even difficult (I don't always bring a tooth brush to dinner) but some sugar free chewing gums are a decent enough substitute.
You're saying "That should never happen".
He's saying "That's nice, but frequently when I switch to a new toothbrush it happens".
Meaning that his old one was no longer cleaning his gums properly. Hence his original proposition that one needs to change toothbrushes more every few months.
Gums bleeding with a new toothbrush means the old one wasn't cleaning well and the "good thing" is it's a good thing the switch was made as now the oral hygiene is improved.
I'm aware ads influence everyone in some form, I just don't think the influence is so strong to me that it's going to make me do anything majorly against my best interests.
> Some example: * You don't need to change toothbrush every 6 months, that's BS. Toothbrushes are plastic they are going to last hundreds of year more after we are all dead. * You don't need to put so much toothpaste on your toothbrush, it was Colgate ads that started showing people putting a fat and thick long toothpaste on toothbrushes to encourage more use/consuming of toothpaste. * The alkasetzer guys wanted to double sells, what did they do started showing commercials of people throwing 2 tablets instead of one. * Also shampoo and hairproducts, they started showing people putting a ton of shampoo in their hands and making bubbles in their head. Actually you don't need that much shampoo.
My issue with these examples are 1. these kinds of products are cheap and 2. using a bit more than you need isn't likely to have negative impacts, so therefore I'm not going to dedicate a lot of time into researching these things. For expensive and important products (e.g. laptop, phone, mortgage, anything to do with health) I'm going to treat ads as a very bias source and look for more objective sources.
I really just don't feel it's a big deal and I tend to avoid big brands. It's not time efficient to scrutinise every small purchase anyway when most of those kinds of products are roughly the same. I'm not going to get tricked into spending so much money on toothpaste, shampoo etc. that it will have an negative impact on my life.
Yes, I understand ads influence, but I think people go really over the top about it using terms like "brainwashing" and "unethical".
I think I often naively assume that advertising only exists to encourage us to buy one product in preference to another. Of course, as you say, it's much more insidious than that: they are aiming to change cultural norms about the use of their products. It doesn't matter if that helps their competitors too - if they grow the overall size of the toothpaste market then it's worth it.
I'm sure there are many more examples like the ones you mentioned. The most famous one I can think of is the notion of diamond engagement rings being invented by a diamond company.
I wouldn't be surprised if conversations like the one in this comedy sketch really do happen [0].
A more modern attempt, selling women on the need for douching, largely failed.
But for the rest of us, having a helping hand to cover up excessive BO is actually quite helpful.
Personally, I avoid the over-perfumed variants, I prefer something that just cuts down on odor, without adding too much of its own. There's a nice line of perfume-free soaps and such available here, under the brand name "Neutral".
I also don't poop in a hole in the ground.
I was merely commenting that here are two very similar products, both purporting to be hygiene related, both appealing to "what will other people think?", and one caught on massively (though, per the article, after some initial pushback), while the other has all but died out except in jokes. It's interesting that one caused a major cultural shift (which you yourself are a product of; it's not that you didn't smell in the past, it's that -people expected it-. Much like in many non-western countries; if you go there you'll curl your nose at the BO, but to the residents they don't even notice. It's also why that's a stigma to immigrants here in the US; some immigrants come from places where deodorant simply does not exist), and the other did not.
I would also add that people from other parts of the world tend to have different body odor, which can be more noticable.
For instance, I've heard complaints that we Scandinavians tend to have a slight sour milk tinge to our BO, while immigrants from countries like India have a more "spicy" BO.
Deodorant sprays are just perfume which attempt to cover up the smell, but don't get rid of it. So you end up smelling of both deodorant and body odour.
You took at face value that BO is bad, but that's a cultural expectation, not something "natural" or inherit of humanity. Some other cultures probably don't find "body odor" to be objectionable.
I think focusing on the worst most deceitful and manipulative examples in history isn't a good way to evaluate the overall merits of something.
-OR-, you're an ad blocker who's been an ad blocker for a long time.
When you aren't exposed to that crap on a very regular basis, if you're like me for example who uses paid apps for nearly everything on my phone and an ad blocker on all but a very small number of websites I trust, seeing ads can actually be weird.
The only app I use that has them is a biking fitness app where the only way to get rid of the ads is packaged with a bunch of other features that aren't worth the $99.99 a year subscription fee, so I almost never see them except for this one app and it's genuinely weird when it happens.
Probably dead from the fauna that healthily develops on the toothbrush after some time ;) But the toothbrush will survive indeed.
It's about creating cognizance of the fact that someone else is making money off your behavior. You can be scared of that if you want, but creating that fear is certainly not the aim.
I personally think things which increase people's general cognizance of the world around them are net goods. There's damned little enough of that as it is.
Telling someone they've been tricked and have been turned into a product is ominous sounding to me.
That's your choice, consciously or otherwise.
There's no trickery here. It's not like this is being hidden from people. It's just not widely recognized.
When a cop doesn't explicitly read you your Miranda rights because they want you to incriminate yourself by delaying access to counsel, they aren't lying per se. You are expected to know that cops can exploit you but you, naively, expect good faith behavior from them.
FD - see my profile.
Are there some more benign terms to use to spin this? Or are the correct terms negatively loaded for a reason?
This is particularly important if you believe minors should not be able to enter contracts. By using 'free' services, they are selling something unknowingly, maybe something they can't get back. "additional terms or product requirements (including age requirements) may apply" is there for a reason; an attempt to avoid liability.
This is why I have zero qualms about using ad blockers, blocking third-party cookies, white-listing first-party cookies, and, and, and... An industry with as demonstrably unclean hands as online advertising deserves to die.
Consider media (news or otherwise). If ads are how dollars are made then quality, and accuracy, is only important in so far as it serves as a vehicle for bringing in eyeballs. Consider 3 different examples of content. The first is expensive to make but high quality and people value it highly, they consider it extremely important. The second is inexpensive to make and low quality, people don't care about it much if at all. The third is also inexpensive and low quality but people generally dislike it.
The important thing to understand here is that ads incentivize the 2nd and 3rd types of content over the first. When people pay for their content directly they will pay more for higher quality and more important content (if they are able). When content is just a vehicle for advertising it's much easier to turn a profit on content that is easy to produce and yet has a mass appeal (clickbait, humor, tabloids). And, as we see, that's the sort of thing that becomes plentiful easily today. Stuff that takes a lot of work to get right struggles while stuff that is trivial and salacious blooms.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
[0]Earnings release: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
[1]Q1 2017 income statement (excel spreadsheet): https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2017/FB...
I think it is better, because you are a customer, you just don't pay with cash. Instead you pay with your privacy, and as normal users, we really don't have a good concept of what that is worth.
I find it callous to decry the poor decision-making of poor people, eg: someone buying a fashion accessory when they're struggling to pay rent, and then go on to defend advertisers in a cavalier buyer-beware kind of way.
People are rightfully concerned about the privacy invasion from precisely targeted ads. But they should decouple that concern from the benefits of more targeted ads which are more efficient, because that benefit is real. It does not just benefit businesses either (which are, after all, owned by people in the end), advertisement will increase consumer surplus in many cases as well.
Yeah, I don't understand what people who peddle this quote expect individuals/companies to do to get their product noticed if ads are unethical apparently. You're just meant to rely on word of mouth starting from nothing? I don't see what's wrong with telling people about your product to see if they're interested. Ads in specific newspapers, posters in a street, handing out leaflets in a certain area, ads during a specific TV show etc. are all forms of targeted marketing as well.
If I were you, I would try to educate myself before continuing to write here.
Among the many buzzwords of recent years is the "attention economy". It has already existed for quite a long time (newspapers selling ad space are actually selling their readers' eyeballs), but since a few years ago, ad companies have the technology to optimize for maximum attention.
The effects of attention economy can be witnessed in reports of people quitting Facebook temporarily as a kind of detox, or the general uncluttering movement (caused by sensory overload which is in turn caused by attention parasites like social networks, and our generally hectic lifestyle). In my opinion, the costs of the attention economy outweigh its benefits.
I don't think the solution here is to somehow stop people making products like Facebook though...if you're using Facebook to an unhealthy degree and letting it consume all your attention you should work on yourself in my opinion as you'll just find something else to fill that gap. Facebook has had a positive impact on my social life for example and I don't feel addicted to it.
Unless this is curbed by regulation, which I think is extremely unlikely for the next 10 years at least, you can safely assume, and should assume, that all ads are privacy invading.
If there were no ads, information about products would spread through specialist magazines or website, word of mouth, fairs, etc. Almost anything is better than an ad, which nowadays is just some abstract crap designed to feel one connected to the brand.
Take the latest Google phone ad: it consists basically 99% of people doing (arguably) interesting things. It barely tells one what the product is and why it's useful. That's what ads are nowadays, attempts at emotional manipulation.
As a counterpoint: if you consider that emotional manipulation, then there are many people (myself included) who enjoy being emotionally manipulated. I often consciously choose to "reward" ads that captured my attention in the first 3 seconds by not scrolling by or skipping them, and letting them get their full impression on me. Good on them for being interesting.
I rather like feeling connected to the brands I enjoy.
On the one hand, to answer your direct charge - I absolutely don't mind seeking out and accessing some ads (I've gone to some brands' website or YouTube channel - such as Old Spice - just to watch their ads before, and I've sought out Superbowl ads to rewatch because they're funny).
On the other hand, as a dialectic note, I find your reasoning to be strange and fallacious (specifically, a fallacy of excluded middle or false dilemma). I don't see any reason why someone must be compelled to seek out things they enjoy instead of enjoying them passively. Phrased another way, it is possible to enjoy things as a passive exercise when they would become tedious or unenjoyable as an active exercise. You don't seem to acknowledge this possibility.
I wasn't doubting you. So do I.
I don't see any reason why someone must be compelled to seek out things they enjoy instead of enjoying them passively.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys listening to loud music on the bus that everybody despises?
In order for you to enjoy content without making any active effort, everyone else must be forced to watch it too. Imposing costs on everyone for a slight personal convenience is generally regarded as anti-social behavior.
Phrased another way, it is possible to enjoy things as a passive exercise when they would become tedious or unenjoyable as an active exercise. You don't seem to acknowledge this possibility.
I didn't, because that's besides my point.
How does that enrich your life?
I don't know, that's kind of a heavy question for what feels like minutia to me. I don't really ask myself if every single thing I enjoy explicitly enriches my life.
The Google ad in the UK is basically "hey guys! Girls will be really impressed if you show them this phone!" It's really quite off-putting
I don't remember ever seeing an ad showing a new invention. That is actually not the purpose of advertising. You can't understand a new concept in the time lapse of an ad. In fact, you'll see that new inventions normally become popular via other means (targeting niches firsts via specialized magazines, conferences, etc.) and only use advertising when they already have an established business and market.
The fact is, most advertising is just about manipulating peoples feelings. The first kind is about brand aggrandizing, trying to change how people feel about a specific brand--this brand is "quality", "fresh", "young", "elite", whatever. The second one is about stimulating demand, normally trying to make people need things they did not need before: "you are fat! buy our cream!", "your life is boring! buy our holiday packages!", "you look ugly, buy our clothes!", "you could be healthier eating our pro-active meta-splendidous yogurt!", etc. In either case, the goal is to make you feel bad, incomplete, until you spend your money on more shit.
Personally, I would love to live in a world with almost zero advertising. I am from Spain and one of the things I love about Berlin, where I live, is the low amount of advertising in the streets compared to anywhere I lived before. That is changing slowly though. But I have seen pictures of DDR Berlin and there is literally no ads. Of course, sadly that package came with the STASI and other horrible things. That aside, I would love to be able to walk the streets without having to look at ads telling me to buy shit over pictures impossible women in lingerie, rich men in expensive cars, smiling youngsters partying together, families on vacation in the Bahamas, etc. I know people that consider such world dull, gray, etc. But for me, it would bring some kind of new zen to urban life.
Ironically now, thanks to the Internet, advertisers themselves (and security agencies) are tracking our lifes in ways the STASI could not even dream of. The grass is always greener on the other side, but if you try hard enough you can always get the worst of both worlds.
Still I sympathisize with your comment in a very positive sense.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/7215760007550...
Are there any other wildly profitable companies that sell ads?
I know to be extra skeptical of claims in ads and to do proper research before I buy things. Friends and family give recommendations all the time which I apply critical thinking skills to as well...I don't just blindly do things people suggest to me. Have you honestly ever felt you've been brainwashed by ads somehow?
You can apply critical thinking skills left, right, up, down and sideways, it won't matter if you're flooded with ads for Samsung. And if you somehow figure out that Samsung's products have a tendency to catch fire, Coca Cola will get you. And if you figure out that Coke is sugary crap, one of the other tens of thousands of products will get you.
Because you're probably not applying critical thinking skills to pick your toilet paper, detergent, dog food, toothbrushes, light bulbs and so on and you're not doing that non stop. People that think they're immune to advertising are ironically the easiest to influence, like fish in a barrel.
Cha-ching!
EDIT: phrasing.
Will get you in what way? Is a soft drink purchase really that important?
> Because you're probably not applying critical thinking skills to pick your toilet paper, detergent, dog food, toothbrushes, light bulbs and so on and you're not doing that non stop.
I read customer reviews, industry reviews, nutrition information, cost per volume etc. for important purchases. Is it really a huge deal that you might buy one similarly priced soft drink over another because you're more aware of the brand? I'm not saying I'm completely immune to some amount of influence but good ads and brand awareness is not going to make me spend a lot more money than I would have done otherwise.
In any case, you (by which I mean a general HN reader) are not paying anything to read the articles, so you are the product here too then? So the 'Show HN' are evil too. They can brainwash you to believe <xyz>.js is much better than <abc>.js, even when it's not.
For a hyperbolic example, imagine you had a partner who wanted you to lose weight because you'd got fat and found you unattractive as a result. They choose speak kindly to you about how they feel to see whether they can change your behaviour, and own the possibility that you're not interested in what they have to say.
Is this <em>no different</em> to them using some subtly crafted speech (based on their in-depth knowledge of your insecurities, etc.) which creates some shame or self-doubt, whilst not making their real position or motive clear?
Or equally, one of your children's friends wants them to try a new legal high; in case (a) they describe how they find it and what it's like, and in case (b) they use some social pressure about how everyone's into it and it looks cool, etc.
Or you go to your doctor, and she offers you a new drug for your ailment; in the first case she describes the evidence base for it and any potential down-sides in statistical terms you can easily appreciate. In the second, she conjures an image of your ailment worsening progressively until you are a drag on your family and you die resented and alone; this is a possible but unlikely outcome if you leave the ailment untreated.
In all these examples the two paths are no different in terms of someone trying to influence someone into trying something out, but most people would find the first options preferable to the latter.
I think the point is not that all attempts to change someone's mind are manipulation and so completely morally equal, but that some kinds of manipulation are hurtful in themselves either because they are deceptive or because they hurt people.
A show HN post may be trying to manipulate you, but hopefully it is not using deceit or an emotional over-reach to do that.
All communications have an element of truth, bias and maybe manipulation (intentional or not). I don't see how an ad presenting a product in the best possible light (keeping in mind most countries have regulations about ads being misleading which I strongly agree with) is much worse than information encountered from other places. Obviously I'm against manipulative, inaccurate or deceitful ads though.
I mean are you trying to imply most ads are manipulative? Deceptive? Most ads I can think of recently are along the lines of "check out our new product/features" or "our product will save you time and money". I really just don't see what the big deal is.
Show HN posts will make claims about how they'll benefit you and try to charm you with branding. I specifically see trends of apps telling you that their app is "beautiful" for instance which I don't like... Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with people trying to sell their work to you or what you're suppose to do differently.
Informing people that a product exists is not harmful but that's besides the point.
Take a heavily advertised staple such as peanut butter for example. How I feel about a brand has zero influence on my selection. And no amount of advertising will change that because there is exactly one brand available in my area which has the combination of features that I want (no-stir, un-sweetened and lightly-salted), so that is the one I buy. I could give examples of other basics like hand soap, toothpaste and paper goods that I choose because competing products failed to meet my needs, not because I "feel good about the brand".
"People that think they're immune to advertising are ironically the easiest to influence". I would be interested to know on what you base this claim, and does it differentiate between mere "belief" that one is immune, and the conscious intent to recognize and reject the explicit and implicit messages in advertising.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/fashion/weddings/how-a...
[2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-advertisers-convin...
Please tell me how to ignore google search and google maps.
For example I did this search since I expected it to be heavily ad-based:
http://i.imgur.com/j4ezbjF.png
everything above the fold (visible in my browser) was an ad. I then scrolled down and got to the organic search results:
http://i.imgur.com/hlVB36Q.png
Those are not advertisements. There is nothing to ignore. Google is not paid to show me those, and they fight link-spammers every day to attempt to get the best organic results.
I find Google's search results ads to be exceedingly easy to ignore. I also find them useful and sometimes click them.