Comment by mntmoss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mntmoss | Hacker News Reader

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Advertising readily exploits low price consumers like you, too.

First of all, they find ways to drop quality. At first they have the good deal for a limited time. This results in social proofing - good reviews and customer approvals - that theirs is the exceptional choice - quality at low price. Then they downgrade it. But because you were already buying it, you won't look the next time.

Second, they find ways to engineer deals that lead you down a path of more expensive dependencies. You go to the supermarket, and you get your veggies, and you see a sign saying "best enjoyed with" - and there's a product. Maybe one you know and are familiar with, maybe one you don't. Regardless, you see the sign and the message and you start wondering, "am I enjoying my veggies less because I'm doing it wrong?"

The dairy industry has succeeded at this for decades, crafting all sorts of narratives about the necessity for milk, the pleasure of milk, how milk lets you have moments shared with friends. It doesn't have to have a brand name attached to reach you and reprogram you.

I don't think everyone is fooled by these types of maneuvers. Ye olde cable bundle model isn't going to fool a truly pragmatic person, even if it manifests itself in the grocery store. The drop in quality thing is something to explicitly watch for and expect, especially when the bait and switch you describe happens routinely on sites like Amazon these days.

Once you are aware of the many different ways an ad can manifest, they become uncanny. It becomes a game to spot them, and to think about why this ad was bought to run at this particular time and place. I see that ad for california walnuts playing out in public, and it feels absolutely dystopian. I think they say "heart-heatlhy, california walnuts" about a half dozen times in the clip, like a mantra. The spell is broken if you ever read about the nut industry's water use, and connect the dots with the ever present threat of drought in california, and climate change worsening it all.

It's a fallacy to think that higher priced items are higher quality: people fall for this all the time. Those high priced jeans and that 20$ fancy pizza might be made of equally bad stuff as a 5$ little ceasers, you won't know unless you investigate.

And, low quality isn't always bad. Even the cheapest t-shirt and jeans in the world can last years if not decades: I know because I have them. I don't need to switch to another product because of "low quality".

Maybe I'm just less susceptible, but I've never thought: "am I enjoying my veggies less because I'm doing it wrong?" due to a sign in the grocery store.

As for milk, people talk about the 100s of milk choices. I don't see that at all. I don't drink cows milk. I see there's only 2 types of soy milk to choose from. And both of them contain added calcium sulfate. I have to go to a specialty store just to get unadulterated soy milk.

And, I simply don't let ads tell me what's pleasurable and what's not.

Now, reminder advertising could theoretically work on me. If there was an ad reminding me to buy certain types of veggies (cucumbers, spinach, broccoli, etc) just as I was running out. But my tastes and interests are so far removed from the average person that 99.99% of the ads are for things I would simply never buy and thus they are ineffective (how often do you see ads on the TV for fresh veggies or fruits or beans? ~ I rarely if ever see one).

Almost Everything people know about dairy is false, I've been saying that for years. The list of lies goes on and on: "Great for your bones", "part of a balanced breakfast", "High in calcium" (it is but your body can't absorb most of it), "good for your health (it's actually strongly linked to prostate cancer)", "Vitamin-D" (vitamin-D isn't even a vitamin, it's a hormone your body can produce all on it's own with exposure to sunlight).

So all those messages from the dairy industry are falling on MY deaf ears. Ads don't tell you about their product (at least not honestly most of the time), they tell you more about the people buying the product.

And, on top of all that, for all the talk of ads being everywhere, i don't get many intrusive ads. I don't have cable or any other paid subscriptions. there's almost no billboards where i live. the books i read don't contain any. hackernews has very few ads, etc.

if advertisers knew anything about me at all, they'd avoid targetting me to save money on useless ad spend. lolz maybe that's why I don't get much ads.

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