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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

I keep wondering whether such tools should be even legal. Where is the line between making sure you show your advert to people most likely interested in your product and straight up manipulating people into buying something they don't need?

In the past, if you sold let's say car parts, you would then naturally buy advert on a car forum, hoping that people interested in cars would click your ad and see what you have to offer.

Now you that such forums are mostly gone, you have the whole science of nudging people into buying something using your personal data harvested in questionable ways, various funnel strategies and so on. Why is this socially acceptable?

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While I'm a vocal critic of both Facebook and Google, do they really make people buy things they don't need by manipulating?

Anecdotally, most of the marketing material and discounts that people around me get and then use to make a purchasing decision came from email. Not Google or Facebook shoving shit in their face, plain old email. Are you going to call for a ban on email?

The times I've been convinced to check out a product were only because either a.) their product was really good in the ad and b.) the ad was really good. For example, I still show that Honda R button ad to people who haven't seen it. And even though that ad was still brilliant, as I type this, my Google query (to reconfirm) was "Hyundai R button ad". That's right - that unique and famous YouTube ad that I still remember from 2015 was still not enough for me to even remember the name of the company, much less the name of the product!

Most ads are obnoxious and/or boring, and simply exasperating when they interrupt you in between, but nowhere near manipulative. Facebook and Google's major flaw is not in the advertising model but in the way they amplify voices of like minded people who are otherwise irrelevant personae.

I always took it as name recognition/playing the long game.

I'm not currently looking to buy a car. When I do there will be 10ish years of product placement in movies, banners, radio and TV commercials, magazine ads, youtube ads, good press, and bad press that I've been 'ignoring' that will undoubtedly play somehow into the purchasing decision.

Exactly, it has always been about brand building. Which is why I find Amazon and Deliveroo tiresome. These guys just replaced TV and newspapers in the ad business.

This is a completely different beast. I am subscribed to a couple of companies that from time to time send me email about promotions they have and sometimes I buy those products.

Or the impossible dream advert advert Honda basically won car adverts with that one.

>Why is this socially acceptable?

Because most people don't know that it's happening, and of the people that do, most don't care.

> manipulating people into buying something they don't need?

This shows you have very little idea how advertising business works. There’s a lot of bad and shady stuff, sure, but that’s extremely naive oversimplification. It’s like saying that software engineering exists to steal jobs from people and give them to machines instead.

People who work in telemarketing or bulk mail or spam all make similar arguments, but I don't buy it.

There are narrow cases where advertising can be societally beneficial, but this is not the case the vast majority of the time.

It’s not about arguments, it’s about educating yourself on the topic before making definitive conclusions.

Bringing up telemarketing and spam when we talk about advertising is as relevant as bringing ransomware as an argument against encryption.

What do you think the difference is between telemarketing and other forms of advertising that makes comparing them an expression of total ignorance, worthy of gratuitous insults?

The premise of both is forcing people’s attention to focus on an unsolicited message as a way of manipulating them into doing something they would not otherwise do or buy something they would not otherwise buy.

Spreading those manipulative messages through phone calls or paper mail does not seem to be fundamentally different than spreading them through interstitial television clips, magazine pages, billboards, spam emails, or website popups. All of these delivery mechanisms are ugly, unpleasant, and typically exploitative.

Personally I find e.g. Facebook and Google’s panopticon-driven advertising empires to be more ethically problematic than many kinds of telemarketing and junk mail. Facebook in particular has caused more concrete harm in the world than any telemarketing firm.

Why is me telling you about a product I’ve created, or service I offer exploitative? Are 100% of products you use in your life, products and services that you’d know about their existence and value they can provide to you without any form of advertising?

If my aunt opens a hair salon and buys ads to get potential customers to come and try her service making world a worse place?

What if I build new app, that helps to solve child sleeping problems for new parents - i should just hope they stumble upon it by accident, and God forbids try to advertise to new parents?

I’m not arguing there isn’t lots of crap in advertising market, or that big tech ads don’t have problems. But ads are much more complex, and it serves much more use cases than typical “let’s kill all ads with fire” person on HN is aware of. For big chunk of them their only expertise in ads ecosystem is installing Adblock.

You dodged the question. What do you think the fundamental difference is between your aunt leaving doorknob flyers, cold-calling neighbors at dinnertime, sending spam emails, buying TV ad slots in the local news program, putting up a billboard on the highway, or buying targeted facebook ads?

Do you think there is a fundamental difference between your aunt’s salon and someone selling candy to kids, encouraging people to ask their doctor about a named pharmaceutical, describing a casino’s slot machines, soliciting donations to a megachurch, talking up penny stocks, presenting jingoistic propaganda, making unfounded accusations about a political rival, or describing a phone sex hotline? Where do you draw the line between advertising that you consider beneficial (or ethical) vs. not?

Of course there’s fundamental difference between all those things you’re describing, and you’re arguing in dishonest way if you pretend not to see it.

I’m not arguing there aren’t bad uses of advertising, or bad channels to do it. I’m arguing this is very complex space that you cannot just simplify to few anecdotes and claim that based on it proves it’s detrimental to society and should be destroyed. There’s no point in continuing this conversation, bye.

Your answer to the question was another dodge + more gratuitous insults. So I guess we can all agree we are done here.

Telemarketing and spam are advertising. It's all the same game as digital advertising, just different mediums.

Your hostility to the idea that advertising is a net societal ill reminds me of the quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I’m not arguing they aren’t form of advertising. Same as ransomware is a form of encryption. Should we ban encryption, because it’s being used for bad things as well?

I’m also not hostile to an idea that advertising maybe net negative. I’d love to see a study that shows that. But I’m very septic about someone bringing that idea as a given truth, while they lack even most basic knowledge about advertising.

I think you started a mini flame war by over-reacting to that phrase. The original commenter acknowledged from the get-go that there is a difference between advertising that benefits people and that which doesn't. But you've selectively quoted them and repeatedly insisted that not all advertising is bad, even though they never claimed it is. You made things worse by repeatedly calling people ignorant, which just doesn't help to cultivate constructive discussion.

How is this different to how advertising has been done for hundreds of years, e.g. newspapers or a billboard on a public street?

Aren't they "manipulating people into buying something they don't need"?

Today advertising looks something like this:

- You go to a shop and ask for information about what kind of tires they have

- A spotter sees you and phones the ad company that you were seen at such and such store asking for tires

- The ad company already knows where you do usually walk and what time

- They send agents with tires on billboards who follow you on the way to work and back and whenever you look they try to shove a banner in front of your eyes, sometimes even slowing you down as you try to walk past them

I am pretty sure if they did exactly the same as they do online, but offline, that would be illegal (stalking for starters)

The vast majority of advertising is not a socially productive activity.

There is a narrow use case that can be productive when informing a buyer of the existence of something they actually need, but this is not the case 90+% of the time.

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