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Comment by jeeyoungk | Hacker News Reader

Finally.

I've been intentionally clicking ICO ads so that I get targeted for more ICO ads. It's been interesting.

- Many of them have the most buttery smooth introduction video that was just so compelling to stare at.

- Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion...

- The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European. Some of them have links to LinkedIn. I looked at their (I believe fake) profiles too. (I don't know why would anybody use their real identity to pull such a thing).

- Some ads are in Korean (understandable, I speak Korean and cryptocurrency is hot over there), some ads are in Chinese including their landing page. Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?

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I love your idea of clicking on facebook ads just to see what would happen for a person that did happen to be in that cohort. Other things I have thought of that would be interesting to do this experiment with is multi-level-marketing BS, political ads catering to the opposite side of the isle, and "Preppers". I would find that much more interesting than my current facebook feed that just feeds me more of what I am already into.

Tangentially related, I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is.

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grasshoppers#Quotes

what?

The few “squeaky wheels” making the most noise - determining the very face and presentation of a context (in this case a field full of cattle, in GP’s case a handful of advertisers on radio) - is an old idea that even has prose to describe it.

So, comparatively, a few bad screaming apples spoil the whole bunch? (should clarify, I'm not disagreeing, just trying to relate)

It's more that the apparent signal, whatever it is, is not the whole of reality. And often gives quite the mis-placed view of same.

And if the name Edmund Burke means nothing to you, you've a whole universe of enlightenment to attend to.

Ah ha, Ok, so the ones who are most vocal and/or visible are, more often than not, not accurately representative of the <subject> as a whole.

I think the Olde-English-y sound of the original quote threw me for a loop. In any case, I agree - that makes total sense.

Quite often not.

Attention is the ultimately rivalrous commodity, and it's very easily consumed. Where true significance is carried by what's hidden or indirect, this can be especially pernicious.

In the negative case, yes. In the positive case, a few well behaved individuals viewed in isolation could cause a misunderstanding of the wider population (“ideal minority effect”).

>And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is.

What makes you think that the locals listen to those radio ads and assume it represents their own grass-roots culture? I grew up in a small town and the radio ads were dominated by a few dominating businesses, but I was never under the illusion that they represented the culture at all.

I think you are right for what outsiders think the grass-roots culture is, but that's a completely different statement.

That happened for me with programmer T-shirts. That's all they showed for months and now it seems to have waned in intensity.

> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?

One technique scammers use in general is not to make things too legit because that would attract people with a clue. Make it just barely credible and get the most gullible people possible.

So those fantastical emails about a rich prince in Africa that needs your help to cash $20m is just scammers improving their signal-to-noise ratio (or ROI). I think it works for these ICOs too.

I never considered that scammers specifically tailor their message to be “dumb sounding scam” in a calculated way (to attract the right targets and repel others). I always thought it was just the nature of the intelligence level of folks who choose to scam rather than work to make something.

It’s just even more pure, distilled evil - with no benefit of the doubt of stupidity - when viewed from this angle :-(

There is even a research paper related to this phenomenon. Microsoft Research researched Nigerian scam e-mails. Turns out intentionally dumb messaging does help in filtering out targets that might be too smart to fall for the scam. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

Hanlon's razor has not been proven for cases with money involved.

Why? There’s no manual component to accepting money for an ICO, is there?

I did the same. For people who haven't seen the ads, here are 3 I seen so far: https://imgur.com/a/tsOOe

"... Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Video..."

just add cannabis and kittens and you've really got something!

"Join out project and get book your place in the whitelist! "

Sounds awesome.

my favorite is the last one:

> Tokia.io token sale is live! Secure the -35% discount for early investors.

spot on given the (imo) insane speculation that's been building around block-chain currencies for the past year.

Haha, wouldn't a negative 35% discount be a 35% surcharge?

> Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion...

I've heard this called "Chinese math", a near-fatal flaw in business plans, because of the follow up to that framing: "... if we only manage to capture 10% of the Chinese soda market, we'll be forever rich!"

Turns out capturing 10% of Chinas soda market is hard.

Also you can only really set value on the things you can/will capture, not what you wish you could...

The fallacy is not that capturing 10% of China's soda market is hard, but that even capturing 0.01% of China's soda market is extremely hard.

0.01% of the Chinese soda market is hard to capture, for you or I, but doesn't provide the necessary market cap to engage in the fallacious thinking and investment at the scale that people who talk about "Chinese math" care about...

And from that VC perspective: 0.01% of the Chinese soda market is not particularly hard to capture..

> Chinese soft drinks consumers prefer to purchase non-alcoholic beverages by brands of foreign origin... in 2013, only 20 percent of the purchase came from local brands. Coca-Cola, remains the dominate brand in China’s soft drinks market.

So, Pepsi Cola invested and got a Chinese partner with a market disadvantage, from 2007 to 2012, to grow their market share from 8.8 to 12%... That's __320__ captures of 0.01% of the market in just 5 years from a single player.

... 0.01% of the $69 Billion Chinese soda market is just about $7 million in sales revenue... That doesn't leave a lot of margin to fallaciously justify a business plan with. $7 million in revenue is harder than playing XBox, sure, but not exactly a moon landing either.

> The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European.

What's wrong with that?

1. It shows they are intentionally targeting people in the US. CPC rates for US consumers is much higher than for eastern europe / russia. 2. It is just shady. Investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US. Not to single out Russian/Eastern European, investing money via ICO outside US is like asking to be robbed.

That's not based on Russian / Eastern European, it's based on SCAM levels across the whole cryptocurrency sector.

> targeting people in the US

Anyone doing >anything IT related<, will target the US, first. Everyone outside the US with a startup idea does that. People there have the biggest investors, biggest tech scene, biggest chance of success, etc. I don't see how Russian / Eastern European targeting US makes them scammers.

> investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US.

And that's related to the entity, not the team. How about a team of Russian / Eastern Europeans with an American entity? Would then be not a SCAM?

Of course I think what is stated in the OP is pure prejudice.

There are multiple scams originated in every nation, so let's not put the guilt on origin of the team behind it.

Vitalik is a Russian-Canadian, as well as lot's of good guys working on Cryptocurrency.

Oh come on. He's saying people are based in Russia which most probably will not extradite them into the US if they turn out to be scammers. So it has nothing to do with being Russian, but has everything to do with being based in Russia due to legal implications.

Governance is lacking in those countries. And if you look at levels of corruption it it significantly higher.

So it's completely legitimate to be wary of businesses run from those countries.

That's a fair enough response. Still if someone on here said you should be wary of businesses run from China or India (which have the same issues), I don't think the response here would be so cordial.

Are you kidding? How would a US person possibly dream of enforcing a court judgment against any China entity?

Russians/East Europeans are more visible for their high tech/cheap talent. When I tell my friends that their startup idea is very complex, they say "I'll hire a Russian developer, pretty sure he will figure out something". Sorry, I've not seen them using China in the same context.

Makes a successful lawsuit and recovery near-impossible.

Intrinsically? Nothing. I think he's just making an observation, not insinuating anything.

How many pages had links to source code or white papers ? Or had any visible code at all?

> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?

Huh? I assume those are just aimed at people who speak/read the language.

Sorry, forgot to add that I don't know any Chinese and I don't have any reason to believe that Facebook thinks that.

Maybe the fact you keep clicking on Chinese ads is reason enough?

which would still leave the question why he was offered it in the first place

Exploration vs exploitation. If the ad has a high CPC and there isn't enough targeted inventory, it's worth showing it to random folks to see if a new target market can be identified.

> there isn't enough targeted inventory

Did I just get called 'inventory'? God, that's the next step after "human resources"...

I much prefer human capital, myself.

Still better than "natural resources"

be happy, at least you are targeted

If he's Korean, that's a huge market for all of the cryptocurrencies according to recent reports - even a tiny effect would be worth advertising to get in the door through network effects. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42713314

Maybe there's another option the creators selected that they think correlates to reading Chinese. Maybe they went for some pan-Asian option. "Uh, anyone who reads Chinese, Korean, Japanese is probably fine".

Facebook thinks I speak Swedish, and I don't speak a word of Swedish.

I was recently served an ad in Swedish, and when I clicked the little "why am I seeing this?", it said it was targeting people who speak Swedish in my area.

Well, you keep clicking the ads.

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