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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I cannot wrap my mind around why growth hacking/analytics tools make such profitable businesses. They don't add any actual value to society, so it doesn't make sense that they should be profitable at all. All they do is deceive people into thinking that a low quality product is actually good (and distract them away from better alternatives). Why is it that so many profitable businesses these days add 0 or negative value to society?

It seems that the best way to make money for yourself these days is by destroying value; by obfuscating facts, masquerading, deceiving, pretending, laundering, coercing, manipulating, diverting attention, saturating the media, manufacturing hype...

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> In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

Adding "actual value to society" is a very vague term and very prone to opinion.

Adding value to a business process is much easier to define.

>> Adding value to a business process is much easier to define.

But the effects of a business process on society are really important.

Money is a social contract which is universal and fungible. It was designed to be a measure of the value that an individual brings to society and which that individual can redeem from society.

If we lose sight of that fact and focus only on thinking about individual business processes in isolation, then the economy will lose its substance; it will be all smokes and mirrors; and everyone on the planet will end up wasting their lives working on one silly trend after another instead of helping to make actual, lasting progress.

You make a good point, and a lot of sense, but also a very abstract point. While I agree, it's good to think about business processes in a macro sense, most of the time that won't solve the problem of where you can add value.

Because you are making a ton of assumptions. I'm sure there are some spammers using this service. But I'm sure there are lots of legitimate users too.

If people value what is popular then the art of making things (appear) popular will always be in demand. Many things can be simultaneously valuable and "bad".

> They don't add any actual value to society, so it doesn't make sense that they should be profitable at all... Why is it that so many profitable businesses these days add 0 or negative value to society?

This is a contradiction. If it is profitable, then it is creating value. Society (or anyone) is allowed to value things you think are bad.

No. If something is profitable, it moves value into someone's pockets. Bank robberies, advertising/spam and nigerian scams are all profitable but create no value.

I know it's cool to hate on advertising these days, but (un)fortunately advertising does create value -- it connects people to products they didn't know they could buy or wanted to buy. People are consumers, whether we like it or not, and they enjoy consuming things. If people didn't click ads, then it would eventually not be a thing.

If advertising created value, people would seek out ads. They might even pay for them. In reality, they block them.

> People are consumers, whether we like it or not, and they enjoy consuming things.

Making people want to consume things is the point of advertising. Looks like it works.

Most people's consumption is not limited by how many things they are "connected" to, but by money. Exposing someone to stuff they can't afford won't make them happier.

> If people didn't click ads, then it would eventually not be a thing.

If people didn't use heroin, then it would eventually not be a thing.

> If advertising created value, people would seek out ads.

Yes, they click them.

> In reality, they block them.

Some do. Others click them.

> Making people want to consume things is the point of advertising. Looks like it works.

Yes! It does work, but don't forget everyone has their own agency. No one is forcing you to click ads. But people still do -- it's almost as if they get value out of it. Otherwise, why would they click them?

>> If advertising created value, people would seek out ads.

> Yes, they click them.

Those are completely different things. Ads do their harm by being displayed.

> No one is forcing you to click ads.

People are forcing me (or try to force me) to look and and listen to ads. That's the problem.

> Ads do their harm by being displayed.

Do you have any research to back this up? If someone owns real estate, they can put whatever they want on it. If it's a billboard with an ad, and you don't like ads, then that's a personal problem. I too had this problem, and I used an ad-blocker. Some people don't have this problem, and they don't use ad-blockers.

> Do you have any research to back this up?

Now I know you are not arguing in good faith. Asking for citations about things that are obvious is a classic shill tactic. I will not let you waste my time.

> If someone owns real estate, they can put whatever they want on it.

And that's derailing. Whether someone is legally allowed to show ads is not even the topic.

Huh. I guess I'm a shill now, which sucks because I'm not getting paid for this! I've made plenty of "anti-advertising" comments in the past if you go through my comment history, so your theory that I'm a shill is weak and seems to be a superficial attack on my character rather than a well-researched observation. I guess there's not much I can do other than continue explaining the same thing in different ways, hoping one of these ways sticks for anyone who is reading this thread and is still confused:

If people click ads, then people get value out of them, otherwise those ad-clicking people wouldn't be clicking ads. When people do literally anything voluntarily, it's presumably because they get value out of it. The fact that <div>s are rendered with ads in them is a problem between you and the website you are voluntarily going to. You may use an ad-blocker if you don't like some of those website's <div>s. Not everyone uses an ad-blocker. If you think everyone uses an ad-blocker, you are mistaken, but you can continue believing that and you can continue being confused as to why advertising creates value.

If someone voluntarily exposes themselves to ads, then yes, those ads are probably valuable. But that does not happen. Ads are not on separate websites, where people that are interested in them can voluntarily look at them.

Instead, websites try to force people to look at ads by embedding them with useful content, by blocking or bypassing ad blockers. They charge people for avoiding ads.

I'm sure there are instances where people voluntarily and intentionally expose themselves to ads. But those are rare, the vast majority of ads are forced upon people because they provide negative value. (Not blocking ads is not necessarily a choice, but the absence of a choice)

> ...websites try to force people to look at ads... They charge people for avoiding ads.

Do you know how the web works? When you go to a website, you are making a request to someone else's servers. If you don't like what they are serving, then stop going there. Vote with your attention. I have stopped visiting places like BusinessInsider due to their adblock-block and free-quota walls. They no longer get traffic from me.

> If someone voluntarily exposes themselves to ads, then yes, those ads are probably valuable. But that does not happen.

It does happen, it's called "coupons". There are plenty of coupon aggregators that people use all the time: RetailMeNot, Groupon, Ebates, Slickdeals.

> Do you know how the web works? When you go to a website, you are making a request to someone else's servers. If you don't like what they are serving, then stop going there. Vote with your attention. I have stopped visiting places like Businessesider due to their adblock-block and free-quota walls. They no longer get traffic from me.

Trying != succeeding. If someone applies force, it rarely means you cannot choose not to comply. But you'll suffer from the consequences.

> It does happen, it's called "coupons".

Not really. The value of coupons is that you get discounts, not that they advertise something. Classifieds are a better example.

(Arguably we would better off if coupons did not exist and companies just set proper prices to begin with, but that's beside the point)

Either way, even if valuable ads exist, advertising as a whole still destroys value because the vast majority of ads are destructive.

Except for Microsoft and Facebook all the email newsletters/new product announcements/whatever actually add value to my life since I actually find them interesting or I'd click the unsubscribe link.

With Microsoft I try to get them to stop sending emails but it seems to not even be possible without some sort of advanced MSDN certification.

With Facebook they seem to come up with some new opt-out classification every time they get some bad press and start filling up my inbox with stuff I couldn't care less about.

Growth hacking and marketing are all about targeting the right products to the right potential customers. So as tools they are fine and add value to society, because without them product discovery would be less efficient, and there would be more big companies keeping their claim and less chance for indie hackers. Some people may use them to promote bad products, but I would argue that those businesses are the problem, not the tools.

The positive value-added is well captured (through sales conversions), while the negative value isn't. The annoyance of the sendee isn't expressed as a charge to the sender. So it's a net-positive for the sender, even if it's a net-negative for everyone involved. It's a tough problem to solve the general case, even if some specific cases have been (mostly) solved (eg: some types of pollution).

I think it's related to the old "in a gold rush, sell the shovels" adage. And these are often phantom shovels.

Unfortunately adding value to society isn't very correlated to profitability. The most extreme example I can think of is selling heroin.

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