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Comment by poundofshrimp | Hacker News Reader

To folks that are complaining of being manipulated, I always felt that if you can be coerced into impulse-buying something voluntarily, and then regretting the purchase, there is probably not anyone to blame but yourself. Putting aside the existence of ads for a minute (I hate ads too), why do you feel that voluntarily purchasing something based on an ad is “manipulation”? If you resent such purchase afterwards, seems to imply you made a bad decision (rather than anyone manipulated you).

EDIT: care to elaborate the downvotes?

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Many humans struggle to stay on the path of activity that their best rationality and knowledge of a fulfilling life recommends. If you ever stay up too late, drink too much, struggle with a bad relationship or smoking or you know too much Free Flow, you have to chance to be aware of some of the weaknesses in our nervous systems. Perhaps you are so far away from the human norms that you don’t find anything tempting that is not also beneficial, but is it quite common I promise you.

Of course it's manipulation. Ads are made in order to modify your behavior in the benefit of the brand. That's literally the definition of manipulation: to control or play upon by artful […] means especially to one's own advantage; controlling someone […] to your own advantage […].

> why do you feel that voluntarily purchasing something based on an ad is “manipulation”?

There's nothing in the definition of manipulation that says it has to be involuntary.

There are literally psychologists working to use our brain’s design to their benefit. It’s not entirely fair to criticize someone for being manipulated by highly trained experts who labor to manipulate them.

As someone who was in the past a salesperson, I don't see how data-hungry digital advertisement is fundamentally different from old and tried sales methods. Salespeople would kill to know as much as possible about their prospects including their personal life, so that they can appeal to basic human emotions. I mean, this is literally how sales are made. The difference is that in online ads this part of the process is automated with algorithms, which apparently rubs some people the wrong way.

If you are repulsed by sales as an activity, I can see how you'd arrive at the "manipulation" point of view. However, I would much prefer this type of "manipulation" to being hard sold in a car dealership, for example, or having to endure cold calls from strangers. Undesired synchronous sales interactions are much more emotionally draining than seeing computer-generated ads online, IMHO.

Homo economicus. Man may be a free agent on paper but most decisions we make are driven by easily hijacked heuristics.

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