Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.

* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.

* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com

* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.

* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?

Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.

> I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content.

This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

Regarding them keeping my data secure, not selling out to NSA, dropping support for things on a whim, kicking users out of their platform, I can’t really trust them.

Google or anyone else.

It’s just not their core business. They don’t really make much money from AMP. It feels like some VP’s pet project to get a big fat stock bonus.

If you run a serious business. Stay the hell away from AMP.

> This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

Even that is pretty dicey these days. Search for `keyword1 keyword2 obscure_but_important_keyword3` and `obscure_but_important_keyword3` will just get dropped from your query.

You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

> You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

Often. It seems sometimes I get selected for an A/B test where they just ignore parts of my query even if I use doublequotes and verbatim option.

Also this becoming standard means Google have taken a(nother) step backwards since 2009.

Which might be a good thing in the long run. It means competition has even better chances. :-)

DuckDuckGo has improved a lot for me the past year. I used to retry my query on Google when the results were not enough but I don't need to as often now.

Same for me. I've had DDG as the default search engine for a while now. Initially mostly for the instant results and bang shortcuts, but these days I find myself using !g very very rarely.

Same here as well. And I've been finding DDG to even given better results increasingly often, at least on the sample of searches that I've used multiple engines for.

The one thing I really miss is insta-results for things like 'population of USA'. On the other hand, I think Google was going a bit too far with that and started giving insta-results that at times were subjective, or even simply wrong.

Time for the next step: An open source search engine.

I've been using findx.com as my default search engine lately. I still use the find on google option often though, since it's not nearly as good as DDG (There is a search on DDG option next to the Google one as well).

Except double-quotes work only as suggestion, they haven't been enforcing a verbatim search for quite a while now (AFAIR there is/was a "verbatim" switch hidden somewhere in Search Tools).

I use !gvb on duckduckgo to search on google with verbatim turned on. It's the only way to make it work more-or-less properly for me.

Repeat `keyword3` to increase it's weight: `keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword3`

Quotes make keyword3 a requirement

Yes! wtf is it with this these days? double quotes in google search used to have meaning... now you just get spammed with completely irrelevant crap and only a few instances of results with that word hidden after the first 20. It's like they are trying to hide from you that there are only a few _real_ hits.

> The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.

> Regarding them keeping my data secure [...] I can’t really trust them.

Really? I trust Google more than pretty much any other company to keep my emails secure, for example. Very curious what companies you would consider trustworthy from a security standpoint, unless by security you misspoke and really meant privacy.

I trust Fastmail because I pay Fastmail to provide a secure mail service.

I also have a gmail account. Google is upfront about stating they read my email through gmail. Many times I’ve seen Google use dark UI patterns to hide their tracking and snooping. E.g. location tracking on Android or the way they ignore thr Do Not Track header.

Even though they might not sell data directly, they are insistent on gathering it for their own hidden interests.

I don’t trust Google.

I wonder what distinction you draw between privacy and security.

It's the difference between bodyguards and curtains.

Hey, if the bodyguard is tall enough and stand in front of the window, he'll also serves as a curtain!

/jk

Curtains are also a form of security. Attackers can only use your information against you if they have access to it.

What’s another phrase for privacy? “Securing your data.”

non-private data is often insecure data.

I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them. I am more concerned about my privacy being exploited by advertisers, banks, credit bureaus, political campaigns, and over-zealous local governments.

But do you trust the NSA to store all your private data forever and keep it safe from hackers, other governments and even their own employees?

Do intelligence agencies exist to "keep us safe", or to advance the state's economic interests?

I guess one could think of that as a false dichotomy. I’m not sure you can necessarily cleanly separate these two things.

Those two things are more similar than they are different.

You also need to assert that you will never care about the NSA. If, in the future, you decide to take up a public role of any sort, the NSA already has decades worth of dirt on you.

...assuming there is dirt to be found, I interpreted the parent as saying there would not be any dirt of interest to NSA

I would be surprised if there existed a person whom you cannot get any dirt on.

> I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them.

If that's true then why are they dedicated to harvesting and processing all your data?

They're not really. They just don't care enough about the privacy of all the people that don't matter to them. It's still troubling, because there is every reason to expect that people that have done nothing wrong will have someone poke around in their data for the wrong reasons, but I don't have a problem understanding why people are prepared to disregard them - most people will be noise to the NSA. Meanwhile most people are potential revenue to a marketer.

> The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful

Even this is getting less reliable, image search at least.

Reverse image search (from what I can gather from using it) used to try and match the image to existing images it knew, then tried to tell you where it came from and what it was based on data it gathered from the page it came from.

Today it appears to use a machine learning to decide what the image is, then show similar images of the same object with the same visual appearance.

The difference to the end user is before if you searched using a still of a film it would almost always successfully identify it and provide links related to the film and the location of the still in particular.

Today if you do the same then Google will identify the picture has a woman in it using ML and return a search for the word "woman" with just random stock photos of women in similar images then the search listings will just be links to Pintrest boards containing the searched image.

> I know this is a bit cheeky, but HN sometimes has this comically simplistic view of other professions. It's as bad as the older C_Os who refer to all of dev and IT as "computer people." As someone who is both a developer and a marketer I can tell you both fields have depth and value, and neither is easy to do well.

I don't think this is the real root issue you're thinking of. I don't believe HN has a simplistic view of marketers (to contrast, I'd say it seems to have a simplistic view of management). Many people here, myself included, would never deny that the job of marketer is difficult, challenging, and has a lot of depth. The issue we have is with the job itself.

> Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.

This is perfect. This is exactly what marketing should be! Problem is, it's rarely it.

The marketing as we usually encounter it, on the receiving end, isn't about "making something people want". It's about "making people want something". This simple transposition of words is the point at which marketing turns from objectively valuable into malicious and exploitative, and ultimately the source of hate against the whole field.

You wrote that marketing done well "is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data". Yeah, sure. Except it's motte-and-bailey again, because we all know that's not what's going on. The data isn't used to optimize the product to deliver better value, it's used to optimize the product to trick the buyer into purchase. And analytics aren't just guiding product development (in either direction), they're also resold on the side, so that someone else can better trick the buyer into purchasing something else they don't need.

The social contract between the individual and the firm is: the individual gives the firm money, in exchange for the firm delivering value. Marketing, as implemented in practice, is the art of maximizing the money received while minimizing the value given back (because value costs money to make). Hence the hate.

Desire is not a bad thing, and the reason why someone wants something doesn't matter after the point at which they want it. I'd much rather people have agency over their decisions than complain about an entire business concept.

Also products are definitely getting better all the time. Feedback is a part of marketing and personalization to predict consumer needs is the next wave. Tricking users is not a viable business model for any legitimate company.

Then a lot a profitable companies aren't legitimate.

Just yesterday I saw a documentary (in German TV) about magazine ads for overprized health products with little to no actual health benefit (like a shoe insert which, literal quote, "instantly cures 100s of chronic ailments"). These ads always have testimonials from doctors, but when the journalists tried to find those doctors, they always turned out to be stock photo models.

That's marketing at its worst. But also the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of marketing.

Maybe marketing is similar to infrastructure. When it's good, it's invisible; so you only notice it when it fails.

Yes, clearly a health product with no health benefit and marketed falsely is not legitimate, and in many places there are rules against false advertising.

I'm not sure if you're trying to disagree with my comment or making a different point...

> Desire is not a bad thing, and the reason why someone wants something doesn't matter after the point at which they want it.

It matters if they didn't want the product before your marketing campaign, and started to want it after. Desire itself is not a bad thing. Inducing desire in people is a completely different topic.

> I'd much rather people have agency over their decisions

Sure. And marketing as an industry mostly works to override people's agency. That's what all the tricks from Cialdini's book do. That's why the industry is so keenly weaponizing research from psychology and cognitive sciences.

> Also products are definitely getting better all the time.

That's a tangential topic (and a big one), but I very much question the thing those products are getting better at. It somehow never is about maximizing value to the buyer. Quite the opposite, actually - everything from white goods through tools, clothing, cars, to software, is getting less useful, more disposable, less repariable, of worse quality, and locked behind DRMs and service-instead-of-product schemes.

Why does it matter? You haven't answered that, other than seemingly stating that you don't like it.

No, agency is not overridden. That's a crazy stretch. The most advertising can do is create desire, but a person still has to make the decision to act. Otherwise you're talking about mind control and if we had that then the world look very different.

Re: product quality, you're just making quite a lot of subjective statements so I'll skip it.

What value do marketers add to people’s lives? Can you give me an example?

Follow-up question: Do you think the impact of marketers on people’s lives globally is net positive, or net negative?

They enable you to sell the stuff you produce.

How, though?

Do you need them to just announce to the world that your product exists and solves a particular set of problems? Or do you need them to break through the noise caused by all the other marketers? ;).

It's a self-sustaining industry. If you squint, it's basically rent-seeking.

Everyone hates advertising, until they lose their dog.

Information about lost pets or belongings has nothing to do with marketing, and is usually published using in different sections of any communications medium than ads are.

Don't know how you would avoid this. Maybe with a kind of five-year plans for the national economy [1]. But this concept wasn't really successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_for_the_nation...

Huge restrictions of available forms of marketing would be a good start. Done top-down, this levels the playing field, and reduces the advertising expenditure companies need to make - as most advertising costs go towards cancelling out equivalent spending from your competitors.

Introduction of a five-year plans for the national economy would cancel out all the spending from competitors.

I'm not thinking "five-year plans", I'm thinking GDPR + more restrictive laws on advertising content + ban on city billboards, ban on leaflets, + other regulations intent on heavily restricting all other forms of advertising.

> How, though?

You can't buy a product/service you don't know exists.

Product discovery is not why advertising is done.

Could you explain how product discovery without advertising would work?

Word of mouth. Also, pull instead of push. I could walk around the shop and discover a new product on the shelves. Or, pick up a catalog with local companies. Or, pick up a magazine dedicated to companies announcing their products in particular domain. Or these days, Google for a solution to a particular problem.

Product discovery should involve me consciously, purposefully looking for a product, not all possible products trying to come to me all the time.

> Word of mouth.

How do you win your first few mouths?

> I could walk around the shop and discover a new product on the shelves.

What is the shop owner incentive to promote your product this way before he can be sure that he will sell some of your stuff.

> Or, pick up a catalog with local companies.

Your local car manufacturer?

> pick up a magazine dedicated to companies announcing their products in particular domain.

Without ads, how would those magazines be monetized?

> Or these days, Google for a solution to a particular problem.

SEO = Marketing

> How do you win your first few mouths?

Family, friends, people living in the neighbourhood of your business. If it's any good, it'll spread. If it isn't, it doesn't deserve to spread.

> What is the shop owner incentive to promote your product this way before he can be sure that he will sell some of your stuff.

It can be either way for the shop owner; your product might turn out to be a flop, or an overnight success. Stocking shelves is an active process, an exploraition vs. exploitation problem.

> Your local car manufacturer?

Word of mouth. Regular (i.e. not rich) people don't buy cars off adverts, they buy off experiences of other car owners. This works well enough in practice already.

> Without ads, how would those magazines be monetized?

Companies would pay to be put in them, obviously. Also, without ads being prevalent everywhere, people might even be inclined to buy them. The difference is, it would be people who choose when they see ads, not the advertisers.

> SEO = Marketing

SEO == fucking up the Internet by greedily exploiting imperfections of search engine ranking algorithms. It is indeed marketing, and something I'd love to see disappear. I hate SEO, and have been on the receiving end of SEO practices (i.e. blogspam) in the past.

> Product discovery is not why advertising is done.

Actually, it is. What do you believe is the purpose of ads? More importantly, how do you interpret the fact that any product release is based on an advertisement campaign?

Pushing to people instead of letting them pull, + having to outshout the advertisers from your fellow competitors.

No less so than the people who make the products they help sell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com