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Comment by sacrificedcapon | Hacker News Reader

I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need.

Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.

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This, like so many extreme opinions, is just wrong.

An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.

And this is just motte and bailey. Yes, there are some advertisements like you describe. No, vast majority of them aren't like that.

It's like a city was proposing to limit car movement through the center to improve air quality, and you countered with "but some cars are electric and don't pollute!". Yeah, right. Wake me up when most of them are.

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Consumer Reports and Octopart

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics).

[0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886.

I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

Some ads provide a service to the recipient. Most ads, as exist today, provide a net disservice.

I don't think the parent poster meant absolutely all ads, just the vast majority of them. But in so far as they meant all ads, it's still a good point you shouldn't trust them - not even the product catalogs you yourself paid for. There's very little legal and social protection from the merchant lying to you, and all the business incentives to do so.

I feel it's a bit disingenuous on the part of advertisers to claim that any commercial information source is an ad. This basically makes any discussion impossible because if everything is an ad then nothing is. It's a dirty trick of the ad industry.

did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?

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