Hacker News Reader

Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps 20 IBM System X servers (rock solid and beautifully engineered). Cost per that ad impression was perhaps $75,000.

View on HN

I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement.

Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it.

Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want "the best" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with.

The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information.

Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Yah your argument against adverting is bullshit.

Even consumers love ads.

Did you know that they even pay money because they want ads? Those 900 pages of Vogue that they buy every September, do you think they're filled with articles? Because they're about 870 pages of fashion ads. People specifically buy them because of the advertising.

And did you know Sunday papers are a thing, filled with coupons, that are basically ads?

Sorry, but advertising serves a purpose that consumers actually pay money for.

I think people buy Vogue (and all other advertising-sodden media) despite the ads, not because of it.

It would be an interesting experiment to put out a non-ad-subsidised version of Vogue and see how many people bought it. I would guess at "not that many".

If it’s “900” pages of pure content, rather than ads, hell, even I’d buy it.

It's 900 pages of pure content ... but costs $95.

You're probably in minority though. It's like a catalogue. The "pure content" is just fluff.

Even if that "content" is boilerplate drivel like "25 Ways to Drive Him Wild in Bed!"?

Wouldn't that be called a "book"?

It is my understanding that a similar publication nowadays, Cosmopolitan, used to be mostly a literary publication in it's early days. I wonder how the contents vs advertising ratio was balanced at the time.

You definitely want to see the ads. It's like a catalogue.

I'd categorize: 1) making ads available in a browsable index isn't the same as 2) throwing them into people's consciousness without their explicit consent/interest.

Most things are completely different if they are voluntarily or involuntarily. Trend magazines, price comparison sites, and coupons are all examples which people want to be exposed to advertise-like content.

Scam-like advertisement that use browser exploits to track you is not one of them. None would pay for that service, which is a good indication about which from of advertisement is wanted and which isn't.

This whole subthread started with the claim "the only good ad is a dead ad"

You and I might dislike ads but don't you think there's a pretty big chance that a lot of the products you are hearing about from your friends were only brought to their attention thanks to ads? So without ads your friends would not have known about the products that they do now.

Electronic engineers face a similar problem, everyday:finding the optimal components to build stuff with. And at least in the case of standard components, they do that via parametric search tools(poring over many details), combined with vendors exposing a lot of details about products. And it works very well.

I wish we had that in more fields. Would provide huge value, but it's a hard problem. But i suppose if with the right incentives(banning advertising ?), we could do it.

The other source of info for EE's is education and PR, some of it probably pretty unbiased(at distributors sites), due to incentives.

As for ads ? they exist, but they seem to play a relatively small role, and probably nothing major will change if they stopped existing.

Can you point at such a search engine for EEs?

Digikey.com

for example, for microcontrollers:

https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

Parametric search tools are great for Digikey, but they're very hard to implement elsewhere. They're much less useful when you only have a small number of options. They're bad at quantifying qualitative properties like fit and finish or ease-of-use. And you can only compare closely related parts, because until you drill down to the level of, say, a parametric search for exclusively PMIC-Voltage Regulators-DC-DC-Switching controllers, it doesn't make sense to ask what the topology or output configuration is.

Plus, it's extremely tedious to collate and filter all of the properties needed to make them work. Ebay and Amazon barely do it at all. Newegg and McMaster Carr do OK. Only EE components seem to be demonstrate the ideal parametric filter systems that negate the need for advertising.

But I'm still a sucker for buying Linear Tech or TI components before, say, Maxim or Toshiba because even if the parametric search say that both options fit my requirements, the former seem to be better documented and more user-friendly than the latter. That's the kind of advertising you only get through years of writing expensive and high-quality technical papers and producing high-quality parts, and I suppose there will always be value in advertising that fact (or suggesting that fact, regardless of whether it's true for other advertisers) to less experienced engineers.

> But I'm still a sucker for buying Linear Tech or TI components before, say, Maxim or Toshiba.

Hah, reducing your BOM cost isn't a major factor in your decision making? ;)

Edmunds has a fairly good parametric search tool for new cars.

https://www.edmunds.com/finder/car-finder-results.html

Those ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

There must be a point between "advertisement for useless junk" and "useful advice + an affiliate link" where the two cross over, and as far as I can tell the only differences are relevance and directness.

One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me.

Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?

Ads are bad. I'm not shopping not stop. I just want to read my article or whatever I am doing at that moment.

When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain.

I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

You're so on-point. All these rants about ads don't think about who'd pay for the content you're consuming if not for the ads.

You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise.

If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as greedy or bereft of common decency who want to shove ads down your throat. It's a really unfortunate and ill-considered narrative

> If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm hopeful we can smooth this experience quite a bit. In the near future, we have (as the current best extant example) in-browser Apple Pay backed by an HSM (either the touch bar or an Apple Watch). Presumably other vendors could implement something similar since at least the payment part isn't proprietary.

In the slightly more distant future, we could improve efficiency/privacy/reliability by using Bitcoin micropayment channels instead of credit cards, but same idea.

He's not on-point at all. You can find amazing content not touched by ads all over the internet.

Making money is hard but his way of doing it is nothing to admire.

I don't know why you think I need to do something. Perhaps you need to realize that annoying your readers is not the best way to approach the issue.

Leaving aside the assumption that somebody has to pay just because you did something, selling my visual comfort for how much? a tenth of a cent? shows me how much you value your readers.

But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white.

If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments than by a nude person taking a shower. Which only says so much about my personal values and is not really a good thing per se ^^

>But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

No, people research to make informed decisions.

How can you make informed decisions if you aren’t even aware of all the available choices?

Ads are not about being aware of all available choices. It is about presenting one specific choice in the best possible way : not the best way to make an informed decision

Well, if you didn't know of it before, and you were exposed to it via the ad, then do research... what's the problem? Isn't that an informed decision?

The problem is that there's no filter. This guy[1] Thinks we probably see 300 adverts a day, at the low end. Seems about right to me, lets go with that.

If I invest two minutes of research into each ad, I get 10 hours of research, every day. Obviously, it's not practical for me to actually research ads.

Thus, to deal with the raging torrent of imagery being ejaculated at my face by advertising companies, I must fall back to some kind of heuristic. I have two immediate choices: I can assume ads are truthful, or I can assume they are lying.

I know /some/ ads are lying, because I see obvious bullshit like acai berry ads on a semi-regular basis. So if I'm not willing to invest 10 hours a day of research, it's best /for me/ to just assume that all ads are lying to me, and chose more focused research methods when I feel I need them.

Now, if that very simple heuristic wasn't working for me I might be pressed to spend some time making a more complex, less binary heuristic. However, the simple reality is that this heuristic /is/ working for me. It's working very well.

If the advertising industry had standards, and required products to prove out their value before being advertised, then this would not be a problem, and they would actually be performing a valuable service to society. Unfortunately, they will shill for anyone with money, and do so at such scale that the best results-for-effort approach is to ignore the entire content source.

[1] http://blog.telesian.com/how-many-advertisements-do-we-see-e...

I think the point is: "informed decisions [about their behaviour]".

I genuinely fail to see the difference, since our behaviours are the way our (informed or not) decisions are observable ?

It is, however, really obnoxious when you click on an ad once and then are subjected to ads for that same product everywhere you go for months. I clicked on an ad for a Purple mattress a while back and now that's what I see on half the sites I go to. FFS, people, I don't want the mattress, okay!?!?

That’s why we need independent testing, and you should always check the independent tests before buying something.

For example, whenever I need a new product, be it anything from a spoon to a car seat for a child, I’ll check Stiftung Warentest for full tests of that category.

I’ll take the top 2 or 3, enter them on idealo or preispiraten or günstiger.de or hardwareschotte, and then I’ll take the cheapest of those.

At no point in this purchasing process come ads into play, and I get the best results.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems.

For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

I think you're being uncharitable, advertising led the company to have a higher degree of competence and understanding.

Fine, but it seems like a terrible tradeoff for the drawbacks mentioned by oasfboasbfos.

Crikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary.

I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

My gut feeling is that for every advertisement induced purchase you actually want and enjoy, there are several orders of magnitude more marketing/advertisement (directly or indirectly) induced purchases that are unnecessary or harmful.

And everything you buy costs more because of advertising. A few years ago a paper I read said the pharma industry was spending as much on advertising as on R&D.

The idea we couldn't find good products without advertising seems pretty moot with internet search available. The greater problem is seeing through the advertising to assess the product - there's a lot of things like market segmentation based only on different packaging (more wasteful, 'oppulent'). The Capitalist notion of value optimisation might work with false representation and coercion removed from the equation.

Honestly, in the context of the thread, I see the comment as downplaying and trivializing the serious concerns raised by oasfboasbfos. Besides, I didn't insult anyone, but the company as a whole; it seems absurd to me to take personal offense. Every company has its fair share of incompetence.

Your post implicitly suggested the poster was incompetent though, not just the company in general, since procuring the servers was apparently his responsibility. Seems a bit insulting to me.

Just because someone did that activity doesn't mean it was their responsibility. As an employee hired to write software, I've done everything from fixing laptops to cleaning the office fridge.

In fact, in my post I explicitly assumed that nobody was made responsible for the task, exactly because I assume the poster is not incompetent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com